Hidden amongst all these fake prizes was a slip that looked just as made-up as the rest of them, but I actually had prearranged to make it into a reality. Some of my friends own a documentary company (Open Road Media, makers of fine films such as Pun Smoke and the Human Hambone) down in LA and I contacted them earlier in the day: Someone at the party would draw a prize of “A Free Documentary Of Your Choice By Open Road Media.” A choice would be made by the winner and I would discretely txt my friend, who would have a team of folks ready to take the chosen topic and turn it into a “documentary” as quickly as possible. They would then send me the result over the internet and I would play the video on the living room television for the winner and the rest of the party at the end of the evening.

Well, the winner of the documentary prize chose the topic of “Friendship” and the wheels were set in motion. About two hours later, I presented the documentary and had a very confused party, who were struggling to figure out what just happened.

Here is the 2min. 40sec. documentary on “Friendship”:

We would slowly branch out to discover music through them. I became a lifelong Fishbone fan and my first concert was Firehose, both bands mentioned in RHCP songs. We knew that George Clinton produced the RHCP album “Freaky Styley” and found out that Kaley’s dad had Funkadelic’s “Standing On The Verge of Getting It On” on vinyl. Kaley would turn the RPM to 45 and yell, “IT SOUNDS JUST LIKE THE PEPPERS!”

One late night around this time, I turned the channel to PBS and caught this:

I was blown away and I called Kaley the next day to tell him about what I saw. At the time, I wasn’t resourceful enough to be able to find out who they even were. That added to their intrigue, but I soon discovered that it was Sly and the Family Stone and I was an instant fan. I wanted to know as much as I could about the man and his group.

Strange thing is, for Sly Stone (who led the group) being such an interesting story – stealing the show at what may be the most legendary concert of all time to hitting rock bottom while being on the run from the FBI – only little bits of info has come out about him in the last 35 years.² In 2007, Vanity Fair did a seven-page article regarding his sabbatical and potential emergence; This last September was the first complete biography³, “I Want To Take You Higher“, of the man and the band was released. The book reveals a little, but upon my reading felt incomplete. UPDATE: I just learned of another bio that came out in Feb. of ’08 that I haven’t yet read.

BUT, what I’ve discovered after reading Higher is that the Dutch are NUTS for the man. I found that in 1992, two Dutch film students set out to document their search for Sly in “Let Me Have It All” (their results are below); Another Dutch documentary about Sly, “Dance To The Music” just finished completion and was aired on Dutch television. AND, another biography written by two Dutch twins that has been in the works since 2002 is set to be released in early 2010.

Back in ’97, when the web was still in its infancy, a Sly and the Fam fan-site webmaster⁴ was flown to LA by Sly specifically to teach him how to browse the web on a computer. During this time, he was allowed to hear Sly’s 15-year backlog of unreleased material. Since hearing this account⁵, I’ve fantasized of Sly coming back and releasing a huge backlog of unheard material.

These days, Sly is slowly making more public appearances; if only a few over the course of the last three years. While I’m sure that it’ll be tough to reach the level of his heyday, I feel that if I just am able to catch a glimpse of the man, however satisfactory, it’ll feel like I’ve completed something; regardless of whether it has any actual merit or not.

PS: The only site that I’ve found that publishes Sly & the Fam news is this one, but they don’t have an RSS feed. I used Feed43 to scrape the news off of this page into this feed: Sly & the Fam News Feed

Let Me Have It All (1994, 48 min)

Preview for the just released Dance To The Music (2008, 2 min)

The Skin I’m In (2000, 60 min)

I’ve recently been laid off by CultureMob.com. I was an employee of a company where a weak economy shows it’s head much sooner than I expected. The company’s current revenue source is from investors; and the market suddenly became a tougher place for investment (which is too bad, because we were beating all our projections).

For those confused on how I could be laid off from a company that I co-created, I never invested in the company financially as some of the other members had; and therefore never had “co-founder” status. With my primary role in the company being the designer, my position wasn’t as necessary as some of the others (which makes sense to me).

Now, that being said, I’ve been enjoying my time off so far. I’ve taken the time to get my portfolio in working order. I’ve taken in a couple freelance gigs and will start to evaluate what offers are out there. I still wish the best to the folks at CultureMob and am rooting for them to make a great product even better. In under a year on the market, we were able to come close to feature parity while giving the competition a 5 year head start.

So, if you’ve got a great lead for me, by all means, toss it my way. I’d appreciate it.

About 4 of us would get together about once a week and kick around ideas for how to pull this off and generate a revenue model. We eventually drifted away from that when we got more excited about another idea: As the world becomes more and more digital, the tracking of the data that people pay attention to will be easier and easier to analyze. We could use attention data to notify people about events that they might be interested in.

At this point, it was a fun side project and I was always curious as to where it might lead to. It started off slowly and we got more serious about it, eventually convincing other people to join us. Soon enough, I would realize that we could really turn this into a viable business and eventually CultureMob was born.

But I still had no idea that today, I could walk around Seattle and overhear people I’ve never met recommending the service I helped start with 4 guys to other people I’ve never met. 2 weeks ago, we held our first event at Neumos with ?uestlove of the Roots. I never would have imagined that dorking out about attention data with friends in a coffee shop would lead to working with one of my longtime idols.

It’s not as if CultureMob has been instantly successful, but its really starting to come into it’s own. We’ve only been live for 7 months, and I’m already surprised at where it’s taking me. I have no idea where I’ll be in another 3 years, but here’s to hoping it’s just as surprising.

*Photos by Summer Wilson

Last weekend, I decided to do something about the reality of the situation and design a more practical page than the Xanadoo that I originally envisioned. Post our dates, a few samples, post the necessary stuff for the press, and let MySpace handle the rest.

We’re going to spend the next few months in the studio working on an entire new set of material to pull out for the summer.

Finding an incredibly tall building turned out to be too much for our cabbie. Greg and I became curious as we got farther and farther away from the Taipei 101. Turns out that our cabbie loves his GPS system a little too much. We were well beyond the entire (massive) city before he realized that he was in the middle of the woods and began to apologize to us. He got off on the next ramp and then preceded to get right back on the same exact road because his GPS told him to.

By the time we got back into town, he had already doubled our trip’s necessary distance. He then felt that the advice he got from his GPS had served him better than we did and decided to drive into town in the opposite direction of the most obvious landmark in the world.

To end this story, we got there. Eventually. I’ve heard of people going overboard with their blind trust in a GPS device, but jeepers, this was enough to make me really really mad.

UPDATE: I’m telling you, people trust these GPS gizmo’s too much, even in Seattle.

Pretty much as soon as we got to southern Thailand, it became completely overcast and spouting spurts of HEAVY rainfall. We just got into Phuket and it was raining just as much as our mood was souring. We were spoiled earlier with the courtesy and cheap prices of northern Thailand. In the south, the sun and scenery brings too many tourists and too much money. And now we didn’t even have the sun.

So we scrambled to figure out how to salvage our remaining days. We couldn’t get out of Phuket, so we decided to attempt to follow a very loose rumor about a “mom and pop” bed and breakfast joint that I heard about for $8 a night. “Down a dirt road about 2 kilometers from the Marriott” is all I had to go on.

But the cabbie spoke as much English as we spoke Thai and explaining “bed and breakfast” wasn’t working. He dropped us off at what looked like a pre-1989 East Berlin re-creation from the outside. At that moment, what turned out to be the hotel manager walked by and noticed our predicament. He offered to help us and allowed us to stay at what turned out to be a very secluded 5-star hotel for a fraction of the price. We now have our own private pool at our room and several kilometers of our own beach (!).

We were thinking of heading back to Bangkok early, but now we might be a little more flexible with our non-existent agenda.

RESTRICTED SEX

As Thiland’s “sex tourism” industry is fairly well known, it was surprising to find out that Thai culture is farily conservative in many regards. We’ve been denied entry to sections of town for wearing open-toed sandles and for females wearing shirts whose sleeves showed sexy bicep. But even with all that, they swing ALL over the place and seem quite accepting of it. Or at least seem pretty good at ignoring it.

RESTRICTED WIFI

We’re staying the same place as Mark Morgan in Chiang Mai, and the place is a little lo-fi; so I bought a second room across the street just for the wifi that reaches (don’t tell). For $6 a room, I can afford it.

UNRESTRICTED MOTORCYCLES

My $6/day scooter does 87mph! Too bad it’s capped at 50mph…

Anytime Greg and I hit anything remotely resembling a tourist trap in Bangkok, we’re surely going to get asked by locals, “How many years?!” They then commence to point at our beards (occasionally even tug on them). Following this, we’re always propositioned to whatever service that they’re pimping. This happens with enough consistency that it’s clearly a script.

What I want to know is, who disseminates this script. Somebody once studied how spangers were able to consistently display the same sign (“Parents Killed By Ninjas. Need $$ for Kung-Fu Lessons.”) across the country by a matter of months. I wonder if the same logic applies in Thailand. Or if there is some sort of conference where they agree on the best street sale strategies.

There appears to be a parallel in Thailand to Americas obsession with being tan: I’ve seen tons of “whitening” products. All of the lotions in stores contain “whitening” and even most of the advertising here feature very pale Asians that clearly attempt do their best to emulate the West. But as currious as they are about Western culture and our beards (boy, do people like to stare at them), facial hair is apparently regarded in Thailand as unkept and frowned upon, unless it’s a single hair emminating from a mole (?!).

I think I’d rather have a beard.

We just got into Chiang Mai and checked in with the woman at the front desk. The first thing she said was “You should shave that off. You’d look very handsome without the beard.”