owenstrockdotcom

“i’m not a man, i’m an incomplete punchline to...

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:31:00 -0400

“i’m not a man, i’m an incomplete punchline to a joke i don’t understand”

buy DJX Presents 4, k?

http://www.djxp4.com/

Something I wrote in college that I forgot I wrote and it surprised me and I put it here so I can find it again... in case I forget

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:46:17 -0400

It begins with an awkward burst, the wings unfolding from the body, the legs leaning against inertia. The seagull half runs, half hops, it wings bent and beating furiously. The process is frantic, a flurry of feather edge and gray, a squawk and a jump. And then, amidst the accelerating palimpsest, the gray and white scribble, something new emerges. Something superimposes itself. It is as though the bird is already flying, always flying, and the seagull simply jumps to catch the rungs. It runs, it crossfades into something else, it sprints off the crest of the hill into the empty air.

The end of an era. Record stores are now officially an...

Wed, 13 May 2009 03:23:08 -0400

The end of an era. Record stores are now officially an endangered species. It’s inevitable, and right, but it makes me sad. There is no doubt about it, it’s easier to get and discover music from mi computadora, but there is no digital equivalent of the community created by a good record shop. And nothing will ever replace my sentimental joy at the sight of a place FILLED with music. I usually embrace change with an open mind, but this is one loss I will always be a little grumpy and reactionary about.

In other NYC news, Union Square now has solar powered compactor trash cans that can signal to the dump trucks when they need to be emptied.

The future sneaks up on us, and kills us in the night.

Life In LA

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:29:20 -0400

Life In LA

Just updated the photos page with lots of stuff from my trip to...

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:43:03 -0400

Just updated the photos page with lots of stuff from my trip to LA and Canada. Make sure to check out the glacier videos. Lots of awesome stuff like the flick above and the photo below.

Apparently, this is where the fun is at. A small kiosk of...

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:00:31 -0400

Apparently, this is where the fun is at. A small kiosk of overpriced video games in an enormous AA terminal. I think the serifs in the font add to the funicity.

I noticed some asshole tagged a homeless person while waiting...

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:02:01 -0400

I noticed some asshole tagged a homeless person while waiting for the train late on a Saturday. Which is seriously fucked up.

And kind of funny.

In an asshole way.

And then I took a picture of this asshole shit with my gillion dollar assPhone.

Then posted it on a blog?

Also an asshole move.

I feel very conflicted about this.

Accidents Don’t Happen I just watched the film adaptation...

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:42:00 -0400

Accidents Don’t Happen

I just watched the film adaptation of 1984, which was inspired by a recent El-P throwback kick. The samples in this song about, you know, controlling humans through making them suffer and boots stepping on human faces forever are from that film. Cheery stuff, I know.

I honestly think that El-Producto is one of the most talented people to ever touch a drum pad, but he is not someone you regularly put on at parties (not that I didn’t try to make it happen in my misguided college days). Regardless, this song is evil in the best of ways. It’s worth looking up some of the lyrics. The stuff about God having to get a second job on the force is fucking brilliant, but it’s kind of hidden away. El-P always buries his best lines in the noise.

I’ve always found it was worth digging through the rubble.

"Tumbling down a flight of Escher Bach steps delight Cause the man who raped my sister won’t..."

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:20:00 -0400

“Tumbling down a flight of Escher Bach steps delight
Cause the man who raped my sister won’t sleep right tonight”

- Accidents Don’t Happen

I just took an amazing trip to the French Alps with Darrell,...

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:15:00 -0400

I just took an amazing trip to the French Alps with Darrell, Stephen and many, many new friends. We went to a mountain called Meribel, part of Les Trois Vallees. It was enormous, and gorgeous, and most of all very, very snowy. It dumped 2 feet in the last two days we were there. Click on the photo below to see my flicks from the trip.

I’ve also got some more videos here.

Re-Up

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:12:00 -0500

I just uploaded two months of new photos to the smugmug page. The additions include some New Year’s madness, a ton of pictures from my travels and travails on a show called Hitch Or Ditch, and a bunch of other random crap. I hope you people appreciate the love and effort that goes into all this uploading and organization!

Who am I kidding. I do it for me.

I’m about to leave to go snowboarding in France for 10 days. Expect some photos of that soon! Well… soonish.

Strockbot Out

"You’ll start your life between pause tape slices and muddy kicks that lick the salt off your..."

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:02:00 -0500

“You’ll start your life between pause tape slices and muddy kicks that lick the salt off your neck”

- El-P

Lines like that are why I love hip-hop

Threads

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:51:00 -0500

Things move along. Time’s incredible inertia. I look back at old posts, at old pictures, at the realities they contain and how they diverge from now. And I feel overwhelmed at how much happens.

How much I try to capture, to contain. How much is left out. How massive that sum is. How strange.

We leave messy relics everywhere, details tucked away in the infinite places to leave loose ends. The endless logins, the forgotten fragments of thoughts and pictures and videos left randomly across RAIDED hard disks. flickrfacebookvimeoyoutubemyspacefriendsterimdblinkedingoingtumblrtwittersmugmugetc. Scraps of paper on my desks. Old text messages. Pictures of me and a girl I don’t date anymore, forever smiling in that frozen moment.

A happiness preserved, and a world moved on.

I try to reign it in. Catalogue, organize, tamp down. But it won’t inventory. There’s always more off the shopping list than on it.

And the only conclusion I come to is that I really have very little control. That control is a comforting illusion. Life will have its way with me, like it or not. I cannot slow its barrel roll, I can only try and run the rolling logs, keep my feet moving as the timber floats downstream. Listen for the roar of the falls. See the climbing steam.

The Tenth Muse

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:53:00 -0500

As he defied terpsichorean gravity by remaining on the show, he became an object of fascination for news columnists, academics, psychologists and others.

Terpishchorean? I stumbled upon this word reading a silly nytimes article about a stumbling British journalist on “Strictly Come Dancing,” a dance competition show in the UK. While my desire to read this article is somewhat obscure (I have a soft spot for underdog stories and British journalists), I was stopped dead by this heavily academic and oddly pretty phrase in the middle of an otherwise fluffy article.

Being already on the internets, I did the “cmd + t” thing and looked it up. Turns out Terpischorean really just means “dancing” or “of or pertaining to dance,” so it’s really just a fancy, showoff synonym. But here’s where it got interesting, at least for me. Terpischore is one of the nine classical muses, and the muse of dancing and choral song. Wikipedia gave me the full list.

Calliope = Writing

Clio = History

Erato = Love

Euterpe = Music

Melpomene = Tragedy

Polyhymnia = Sacred Song and Hymns (she’s kind of confusing… I read her as the muse of serious meditation)

Terpischore = Broadway Showtunes

Thalia = Comedy

Tumblore = Pointless trivia and spontaneous sharing

Urania = Astronomy (and by association, philosophy and/or thoughts of heaven)

Wait a second… who edited that article?

In summary, what’s awesome about Greek mythology is it literally gives words life, and I’m talking a face and a history and heroic children who die in awful ways. It’s a treasure trove for writers. Which is probably why they’re always invoking the stupid muses in their stupid writing.

So Long and Thanks For All The Howling Fantods

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:46:00 -0500

I just finished reading a great and long and extremely moving obituary on Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace, the writer who taught me the word anhedonia¹ and who sadly took his own life on September 12, 2008 after a long and brave battle with clinical depression.

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

The article is long in internet terms, but worth all 11 pages, and I highly recommend the commitment of reading it to the end, and then picking up anything by Foster did and doing the same. Many people can write, but DFW could flip a sentence on its head and make it do the windmill.

I had a sweat band kicking around on my desk that says U.S. Open, and I noticed about halfway through the day that I had put it on while reading this article and worn it most of the morning and afternoon. Whether it was an accident or an unconscious tribute to the one-time jr. tennis prodigy (see his massive and incredible novel Infinite Jest for more on this), I have decided to keep it on in memoriam of the bandana-clad braniac who was too damned smart for this world. I hope he has finally found some measure of peace.

1. It is amazing to stumble upon a word that basically names a feeling I’ve spent most of my life and vocabulary trying to find the words for, and to make the discovery in the company of a writer so sensitive to its nuances (not to mention the dark plains that lie beyond it).^a

a. Yes, this endnote and nested footnote are a tribute to DFW and his brilliant/infuriating use of them in his writing. The man basically reinvented the scholarly convention, using them like analog hyperlinks. Sometimes annoying, sometimes charming, and always fucking genius. I will miss him big time.

A fun time in the country with Abby, Stephen and Darrell! Check...

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:04:26 -0400

A fun time in the country with Abby, Stephen and Darrell!

Check out more in these albums:

Abby’s Trip To Wilkens Fruit And Fir Farm

Owen’s Trip Wilken’s Fruit And Fir Farm

Owen’s Trip Wilken’s Fruit And Fir Farm Video

Back To The Future

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:22:00 -0400

So I finally caught up to the present, and finished uploading all my photos, ever, to photos.owenstrock.com. All told, it probably took me about 3 months to finish the project (not like 3 straight months of uploading photos, but a couple marathon days and weekends squeezed into a busy summer of production work). I never, ever want to have to do that again!

Anyway, please go check out the page and browse around. Lots of fun stuff. I’m really excited that people can watch videos too.

Some fun galleries:

My Trip To York And Pickering

The Belmont Stakes

The Best Of ALASKA

Enjoy!

I got to ride in a helicopter over New York City at sunset. We...

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:57:00 -0400

I got to ride in a helicopter over New York City at sunset. We went up to shoot the show open for the 50 Cent project I’ve been working on. It was pretty sweet. Click here for more hot heli action and click here for still photos from the day.

Check, check it!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:25:00 -0400

Check, check it!

MobileMoi

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:10:00 -0400

App store is cool. I just posted this with one of it’s toys. Now if they would only let me demo paid games! Oh… And it would be nice if my phone didn’t shutdown randomly when I open apps. Apple! Fix that shit! That never happened when I was running installer.

Geolocate this post

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