New Serious Art Film

New Character! Dan the Terp Fan

Centreville Shootout!

Here's a video of me being a douche-nozzle.

Collin Baker Reads Facebook

Enjoy!

McDermott vs. Milk

Go to Youtube and like my new video!

McDermott vs. Milk

You wont regret it! Unless you hate vomit.

FreakAngels Blows My Freaking Mind

I just discovered this awesome online comic, FreakAngels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield and it's fantastic. I won't waste time with my summarization of the plot, let's just say it is after the heyday of human civilization and it is awesome. Great stuff if you are into realistic sci-fi and beautiful illustrations.

They release new installments in 6 full-color pages like "real" comic books and the story is still evolving so I recommend you check it out! But what do I know? I bite the heads off of fish.

Damn It, Patton!

Well, folks, I was just at Patton Oswalt's webpage (my favorite comedian, he is) and I was reading his blog which he calls the Spew and I realized that while he was on the Comedians of Comedy tour that hard-working mo-fo blogged about it nearly every, damn day.

On Spring break this year, I was on tour with my university's Men's Choir because I am straight and I was planning on posting everyday, but I quickly became too busy/discouraged by the lack of internet-wave-atoms in the shitacular small towns we stayed at. But Patton found a way to post everyday. Good for you, buddy, good for you.

So to summarize the tour:

- Baltimore, kinda scary

- PA, Christian college, hilariously vanilla

- Philly, good show, bad weather, cool shopping in the Strip District of Philly where I found an awesome cigar parlor and coffee shop called The Leaf & Bean, I didn't smoke one cause I had to sing that afternoon, though.

- Blah blah

- Ann Arbor, cool! Great little town, found a great little record store and a great little head shop.

- Chicago, awesome! We didn't do a great show in this one Anglican chapel, but we had fun later!

- Fun stuff in Miami, Ohio (free soro-stitue boobies, yay!)

- Back home.

So that's the ultra condensed form of it, but there honestly isn't that much to tell unless you're very interested in choral music.

I had my second of three finals this morning! Whoo!

Paper?! What am I, an animal?

Wow! So it is now May... And my last post was in February...

Bad writer, bad!

But in fairness, I have been writing, just not here. If anyone follows my Twitter, and I am judging you if you do and if you don't just to fuck with you, I have been busy both with studying for finals and wrapping up principal photography for my short film, "Great." And what do I do whenever I get busy? Put off what I'm supposed to do in favor of reading, pre-schooler hunting, drinking, stalking celebrity dwarfs or writing. In this case, I have been writing like a fiend (or at least faster than my usual rate of -1 pages a day) and I have several new skits and scripts to work on. So, I will be busy at my pool job this summer editing and writing instead doing what I am paid to do (guard lives or some bullshit).

OH WAIT, I can't! I can't type anymore at work because some shitty uncle left his 5 year-old nephew running amuck at the pool, the poor kid drowned and the jack-ass is now suing the life-guarding company I work for and my boss has instituted a hard-core no texting or laptop policy at all pools.

Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand. I think if you are an on-duty lifeguard and you are texting or playing on your computer, you should have boiling hot sand poured into your ears or your thumbs cut off for being so selfish as to endanger other people's lives so you can text your bff all about the super hot sk8er boi @ the snak-shak. OMFG!

But the thing about my pool is: nobody goes there. It is a 5 foot deep pool in a shoe-box-sized condominium community mostly full of middle-aged or older people who aren't exactly training for a triathlon or if they are, they aren't doing it in the condo's table-spoon-sized pool.

Now to be fair, that's an exaggeration. I do get this one adorable couple who come in and workout in the mornings for a half-hour before going to lacrosse practice or rugby (Did ya get it? They're lesbians! ding! ding! You win a piece of candy!) and a handful of ladies who come in and sun-bathe and gossip, but the Golden Girls are only there for like 2 hours and they rarely get in the water. And aside from the occasional snot-nosed kid visiting Gram-gram, the pool itself is not used most of the time.

So I do not see the harm in me finishing all my work for the day, cleaning and sweeping and filtering or whatever, and writing on my computer whenever customers aren't in the pool. Or even in the pool complex.

But, whatever, no big deal, homeslice. I suppose it's just back to the old pen and paper for me. It was called paper, right? I can't quit remember.

Two of my Favorite Things!

In keeping with my blog's self-indulgent, reader-alienating style, I would like to talk about the St. Vincent show that I went to Wednesday night which is the first of the two titular Things.

St. Vincent (Annie Clark) played at the 9:30 Club in D.C. with her backing band last Wednesday which included a violin and woodwind player which are indicative of her past with the Polyphonic Spree. I feel like she got kicked out of the Polyphonic Spree for being too dark, but she kept the kick-ass melodies, willingness to experiment and headphone-throbbing arrangements of the Spree. For instance, she started out the set with her hit, "Now Now," which features a pretty and catchy melody and she ended it out of the bridge with a sudden swell of raging guitar. The gain was so high, this five-foot-two pixie alone created a wall of sound with barely a scrape of her fingernails with a tone that was, to use her own words, "abortion-y."

The night was filled with sweet grooves and atmospheric melodies and wailing saxophones and growling bass an I loved it.

Her light show was pretty kick-ass too. Her lighting designer had a great sense of rhythm and emotion with his lighting as well as humor. There was a lot of LED flood-light-type instruments being used that intrigued me. LED seems to be where a lot of rock shows are headed these days, phasing out the more traditional "tin-can" PAR lights. I cant blame 'em, because the LED is cheaper, more efficient and compact than traditional floodlights. The only problem with them is their inability to focus really or fade their intensity, not a problem in a rock show, but a real problem in theatre lighting.

My other favorite thing is the Mortal Engines series by author Philip Reeve. It is absolutely fantastic. My words cannot describe how much I love this series. To briefly summarize; the world of the story is Earth several millennia into the future after our civilization has destroyed itself in the 60 Second War, a furious volley of orbital and subterranean nuclear and biological weapons that changed the very surface of the planet and wiped out nearly everyone.

But the book is not about that. The story takes place several thousand years after this 60 Second War and we are ancient history that is barely understood. All the worlds great cities were reorganized and rebuilt on top of gigantic tank treads so they could avoid the frequent natural disasters as the earth shifted. The new world order is Municipal Darwinism, the defining tenet of the Traction Era, which demands that these Traction Cities consume smaller cities and towns and cannibalize them for fuel and parts and assimilate the people into their society or use them as slave labor. We are a few hundred years into the Traction Era and prey is becoming scarce as smaller towns are becoming less and less frequent. Some "barbarians" want to do away with this "glorious" way of life and are called Anti-Tractionists and are regarded with hate and suspicion. It is in this volatile and exciting time that our hero Tom finds out that not all is as it seems in the world. Sometimes your heros are your enemies and sometimes the "right path" is not clearly visible through the smoke of progress.

It is a thrilling book with zeppelin air-ships, scarred girl assassins, pirates and walking corpse super soldiers from another time and I could read it again and again. Hester Shaw, the scarred girl assassin, is beautifully complex and sad and is one of my favorite all time characters in literature as well as Grike (Shrike in the original British version) the Stalker, a mechanized corpse turned into a walking weapon centuries before who has developed his own strange personality and has surprising and horrifying dreams and goals.

A must read for steampunk, science-fiction or fantasy fans or fans of Harry Potter or any one who just wants a good book that they simply cannot put down! There are four books in the Mortal Engines Quartet and Mr. Reeve has another prequel series that is coming out with a new book in April called the Fever Crumb series. His home page for the series is http://www.mortalengines.co.uk/ and I suggest that you check it out.

Fun-erals!

So... my grandfather just passed and it has shown me that there are many interesting people in the world.

For example:

- an old woman who used a prayer to publicly slam people who were in attendence

- a middle-aged man who explained how our taxes really go to Al Gore who puts them in Swiss Banks to fight "global warming" (which we all know is false, right?) but that's just a front for the Jews to take our hard-earned American money.

- a man who's idea of an acceptable eulogy at a funeral in an Episcopal church is to make a dick joke, a porno joke and to say "even blacks" read my grandfather's column in the paper. How very P.C.

All in all, it was a sad and somber event, but the few (read: many) nuts in the fruitcake kept it interesting and gave a few good stories. I'm sure my grandfather would've appreciated that.

It was nice to come home, though, and visit my family for a few days, even if it was under a sad occasion and I had a lovely breakfast this morning before seeing the play Hotel Cassiopoeia by Charles Mee. I had to see it for my Theatrical Design class and I did not expect to enjoy because when I read it I did not understand the bizarro, out-there style of the show, but once I saw it performed I got it.

I will miss my grandfather. RIP Poppy.

Polka Dot Dot Dot: My favorite DIY indie, experimental, folk, Americana, a cappella/accompanied, supergroup trio!

Polka Dot Dot Dot are a little trio out of Olympia, Washington and they are also fantastic!

I got their album Love Letter to New Zealand a few years ago and I loved it and I am listening to their new album, Syzygy, on vinyl (opaque turquoise vinyl!) right now and it is even better.

I know what you are thinking, dear cynical readers, that this trio looks like the three tightest-pant wearin', vacant expression, analogue-camera-toting, hipsters you ever done seen, but have faith! If I dare say it, I must say that these guys are the real deal. What deal that is I am not sure. Jordan O'Jordan's (middle) old-timey crooning makes it seem like the New Deal and Colleen Johnson's (right) motherly purr makes it seem like an "Etsy handmade scarf for a handmade margarine tub" kinda deal and Onyx of Olympia (left) seems to have another kinda deal in mind entirely.

Bottom line is their album rocks and rolls with a myriad of powerful sounds and influences and if you are into folk music, harmonies, story-songs about water molecules in love or just wanna try something new, I highly recommend them to all!

Check them out at the Bicycle Records website: http://www.bicyclerecords.com/store/index.php/bicycle-records-releases.html

First Post and the General Idea of This Blog

Hello all, my name is C.S. Baker and I am a student, an actor, a musician, writer and filmmaker. I go to the University of Maryland and I was inspired to start this blog by studying blogs in my Media Literacy class I am taking this semester.

I intend to use this blog as a way to sharpen my writing skills everyday and to share my thoughts with who ever wants to listen. I like many different things so chances are something I say will eventually be interesting to someone! But probably not. But humor me and let me further delude myself, please.

Anyway, this blog will just cover my view of the world as a college freshman, artist, person, bear-wrestler, dictator of a small third world country, etc. So thank you for reading!