by Awl Sponsors

Just as the way we consume movies has changed in recent years with the advances in smartphone and tablet technologies, the way filmmakers make films has changed as well. In this day and age, companies are developing software and hardware to make life on-set easier for those wielding cameras. With that in mind, the folks at Microsoft have produced an online documentary series about how filmmakers are utilizing their technology in creating art.

The first episode profiles filmmaker Chayse Irvin. Chayse’s recent films include the documentary Spirit in the Stone and Blacktino, a feature film that premiered at SXSW. The episode follows Chayse to various spots in New York City, where he talks about the capabilities of his Surface Pro to capture content for both creative and commercial projects.

You can check out the second episode of Surface Pro: Behind the Scenes featuring Superjail! creator Christy Karacas on juxtapose.com. And keep an eye out for the third installment, featuring Marc Kushner on Architizer.com on 9/30.

For more on the Surface head over to surface.com.

George R. R. Martin, who has written some of America’s favorite stories about sister-fucking elves and women who make dragon babies, turns 65 today.

Hold tight, kids, we are this close to the weekend! [Via]

“Launched in 1978 by the Mead Corporation (which was acquired by ACCO Brands in 2012), Trapper Keeper notebooks are brightly colored three-ring binders that hold folders called Trappers and close with a flap. From the start, they were an enormous success: For several years after their nationwide release, Mead sold over $100 million of the folders and notebooks a year. To date, some 75 million Trapper Keepers have flown off store shelves.”

This is a pretty good editorial in the Times about the insanity that went through the House of Representatives yesterday — the great planned evisceration of food stamps. But not, apparently, a great evisceration of farmer welfare? Hmm. Good news though: Congress is hosed. In any event, whatever mangled bill makes it through the House and the Senate then gets vetoed and then… ??? Maybe “no more government.” In any event, you know what we’re not going to have less of over the next decade? Underemployed and food-insecure people. The Louis Vuitton monogram tote is $4000 exactly.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People are always saying things on the Internet all the time. But they are such teases. We like details. So we have to ask.

TODAY IS THE DAY we install the soda fountain. Soon I will be sipping cold Diet Coke or else surveying the smoking ruins of my house

— Dan Kois (@dankois) September 9, 2013

Dan! So what happened here?
We recently finished a kitchen renovation and are on the last step: Installing a three-flavor soda fountain that I purchased from a company on the internet. My contractor, who hates me, came over yesterday afternoon and together we spent several hours staring at instructions, wielding clamps and crimpers and tubes, and staring at instructions some more, figuring out how to install the thing. There is a CO2 regulator, a steel canister of CO2, three enormous boxes of soda syrup, three flavor pumps, yards of tubing and wiring, brixing test devices, a water filter, and a water pressure regulator, in addition to the machine itself, which sits atop our counter, filled with refrigerator coils and pumps and wiring.

We are getting it because we love Diet Coke. It is what we drink instead of coffee. Actually, it is what we drink instead of coffee, orange juice, milk, water, tea, beer, cocktails, and wine. We drink a lot of it. But Diet Coke indisputably tastes better from a soda fountain than it does from a can or bottle. So for years I had a crazy dream of installing a soda machine in the kitchen, and when we did this kitchen reno, I seized on the outlandish expenditure of money we were already making to tack on the soda machine as an afterthought, the way a $25 million monkey-sex research study doesn’t seem so outlandish when included in a $81 billion defense bill.

I ordered the machine from a guy in California who seems to just make these machines at home. I ordered the soda syrup from Sam’s Club online. I got the CO2 from a local homebrew supply store.

Is this installation process as dangerous as your tweet made it sound, and, if so, is it safe to assume that your hatred for Diet Coke from a bottle is so great as to justify that risk? What’s so terrible about store-bought soda?

Probably not. The CO2 tank comes with a LOT of warning stickers and labels, but most likely the tank won’t explode. The real threat of combustion comes from the working relationship between our contractor and me, which always feels like it’s right on the edge of disaster. We both drive each other crazy. I think he is the unreasonable, enraging, intractable one, and I assume he feels the same way about me.

The real problem isn’t with Diet Coke in bottles (which is OK) as with the false promise of the SodaStream, which gives you awesome fizzy water but cannot replicate Diet Coke. The fake Diet Coke SodaStream syrup is just wrong. So then we had this thing in our house which ALMOST made fountain Diet Coke, but did it just wrong enough that it was undrinkable. So then I was angry that it was 2013 and this simple thing that ought to be a basic human right was not available to me. So I took to the internet.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Patience! After several hours of work yesterday, we still do not have a working Diet Coke fountain in our kitchen. But things are getting closer. We need to detach the water pressure regulator and water filter and switch the order they run on the water line, and my contractor is in the middle of an epic quest to find just the right nozzle to attach the machine to the water line his plumber ran directly to the spot of the machine. It’s good we’re getting some time away from each other.

Just one more thing.
Diet Coke should be a public utility. There should be lines running to every neighborhood in America, and it should be pumped directly into your house, like water or pornography. GET ON IT OBAMA.

Matthew J. X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

★★★★ The light bouncing under the scaffold could have passed for direct sunlight, till the direct sunlight appeared. The subway had aired out a little; Prince Street smelled of festival food. The afternoon sun made the eyes squint, and squinting brought down a lit-up line of eyebrows, blurry spangled halos along the top of the field of vision. Stacks of metal boxes of mooncakes were out on Grand Street, and someone had pomelos. Uptown, the lowering sunlight cut through the windows of cars in Trumpville, catching on every smudge. Men walked dogs and children simultaneously. Shadows lay yards and yards long on the sidewalk, or stood, on a wall, almost exactly one’s own height.

“What time does Downton Abbey season 4 start?”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

My Factless Autobiography

The grammarian chooses a place in the open
air for arguments fiction runs sweet
in my nostrils I inhale
a failing air fleet
four of them for to eat
the milky crab the pudding
proof is found in

I am the Assayer of Weights and Measures
I am what I am because I am not
something else I hold a lily
in my hands it is not gross
As a fabric is a historic surface I am propelled
I touch bone & traffic in salt
like minefields & the people we inhabit

Who but the most despairing among us
will dwell on that point tonight?
Good brother, take me to the place
where I may meet ghosts and protein
Where hiatus does not interrupt
the phrasal unit and International Agencies
in which the State participates
consider a lover a stash

My freedom is represented by my desire
to twiddle beard & make face
at women in their apartment windows
I poke my snout through the underbrush
and keep a stash of guilt I unleash
when a red-face appears
When her hat flies off and out
the convertible I grab my pants
My member is being severed
My stomach is so concave
various kinds of hardships ensue

Dear Exploited and Missing Persons
I don’t want to lose access
to fresh luncheon meat at a fair and low price
I have never seen the star you call the sun
I grasp bills like pebbles
and my brow? abounding grief
I would like to take this opportunity
to dig-out the sack
I has the booze she has the chronic
You heat water to a rolling placebo
till truth telling makes a terror threat
What with the dust and human remains
The ferry accidents the bombs
the fast-drying three feet of concrete
What makes this night different
from all other mauls?

At the dog park in the club
People from the valleys from the uplands
from the highest slopes betroth
This play houses countless characters
Young men will stick you up
Imagine walking around the market
not knowing what the seahorse is for

Hide The Poor

As clansmen make laws
the country makes heaps
kings and governors
proclaim franking
to be among inalienable rights

They burn youths
with warm wooden pipes
to leech bread from them
to flood the grazing land
to be brought to experience

The painter deemed most skillful
is asked to depict this
without adulteration
with just one remaining ventricle

Wherever he ventures clerks
give him honor
and cooked food
because they like his commodities

some beads
and little bells

and reciprocally
and how

The unimaginable
deemed inevitable

Prophecy is memory
& our fate is extraordinary

especially in the mines
but not only there
I’m trying to arrange feathers
on this ceremonial shield?
this idea of coinage?

I’m trying to bring meat
heads and steel and crafts
to the gospel of justice
I’m delighting in the bursting
of asset bubbles

Not being subjects
they have no desire
No love for moms

Can’t you hear that reeking?
Don’t you see the big chain
Don’t you see the big grill
Call that deflection
in place of action
Send a banger
crying through the streets

Alli Warren was born in Los Angeles and raised in the San Fernando Valley. The author of many chapbooks, Here Come the Warm Jets is her first book, just out from City Lights

. She currently lives in the Bay Area.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

You know your secret heart, the one you keep hidden away from the world, the one upon which the light never shines because to take it out and show it runs the risk of laughter or scorn or, worst of all, indifference? The one where you hold whatever sweetness you have left over from a life of learning to be hard, the place you put the fears you don’t want anyone else to see in hopes that maybe someday there’ll be someone in your life with whom you can share them, someone who will pull you close and stroke your hair and whisper softly that it will all be alright? We each have our own secret heart, as unique as a fingerprint, as fragile as a china doll, and when it sings it makes a slow, shy sound that asks only to be loved for what it is. Unless you’re me, in which case it goes like this. [Via]