| The Return |
[Feb. 12th, 2008|04:21 pm] |
[Surprise]
My new blog is teetering on the edge of existing! I just don't have a name for it yet...
Watch this space in the next day for a link. New art, new music, new animation, talk about why I'm back, where I'm at, what I've been watching/listening to/eating, an archive of all my old pieces that lived here at the livejournal, and my quest for a new name. Adventure! Excitement! Links! DON'T SLEEP.
EKUNDAYO |
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| Unceremoniously |
[Jul. 1st, 2007|11:42 pm] |
aaaalright, I think when your sister gets married and you don't blog about it until after the fact, its a clear sign that you're pretty much done. (It was great by the way)
Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Me Breathing is going into indefinite hibernation. I'm instead going to create an account at imeem or uber or one of these other web 2.0.1 type places and post snippets of all the new music I'm doing (just sent out a 19 track, 27 minute mix of new beats to all the MCs I'm working with), and probably some select examples of the sound design I'm doing for all these short films (A Graduate student's thesis film, 2:30 minute homage to John Woo, a spec commercial about a robot, etc), and probably an archive of visual art too.
Post with suggestions! What services have you folks used? Do you like them? Your comments may steer me to my new home on the web.
Thanks all you readers who are still checking in! If you lasted these 3ish years and numerous stretches of time without activity, I salute you.
Ekundayo |
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| late notice |
[May. 20th, 2007|12:12 pm] |
WATCH:
The Sci Fi Channel at 11 pm tonight to see Dreamworld, a short that I did the sound design on!
DO IT! |
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| The Week |
[May. 11th, 2007|01:22 pm] |
| [ | state |
| |  jubilant | ] |
•I had a scary experience early in the week that was then resolved, after I learned exactly what I needed to from it.
•My father and I spent 45 minutes locating, perusing, and just barely out thinking and capturing a mouse that had gotten in to our office. He was dark grey, and about 1.5 inches long not counting the tail. We called him "Lentil Brain".
•I'm all but sure that I'll finally get the job I've been chasing since January. And its parameters have changed in such a way that its gotten 20 times better.
•My sound design projects are going well - I continue to get comments from the director that I'm breathing new life and enthusiasm into this particular project for everybody on the team with my early test mixes - suddenly they open their in box and they can HEAR their short film for the first time. It makes all the difference.
•Lost was F-ING CRAZY. And Thanks, John Locke, for taking out 3 seasons of fan frustration by head-butting Patchy and wailing on him till he was bloody because he suggested that there was something more important than ANSWERS. Where the devil are they going with all this?
MUSIC, Other Peoples':
Today, in the same 10 minutes, I realized both Bjork and Gosub had new albums up at Bleep.com (the nicest online music store there is - 320kbps quality mp3s from an absurd selection of lables, no DRM, $10 an album).
Bjork- Volta: wild. She's really opened the floodgates on this one. Its crazy.
Gosub- Watchers From The Black Universe: DAMN! My favorite Miami based old school Electro producer is finally back, after 8 years and a few singles and eps, with a full album of pure ear candy for a kid like me. Imagine Transformers break dancing while you roll by in a tricked out Honda CRX, sipping on blue koolade. And you've got TRON riding shotgun, peeping all the fly data structures. Compute!
MUSIC, Mine:
I'm tryin to push out a beat tape for my all collaborators, a 15 to 20 minute free association mix of new tracks I've been working on. This weekend maybe. The idea being, stop guessing who'll wanna write to what, and just let everybody I'm working with hear whats up.
Thats that. Its gonna be a wild weekend.
Peace
EKUNDAYO |
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| A Rant Upon the Subject of Telivision. (Here be Spoilers) |
[Apr. 3rd, 2007|06:23 pm] |
The current trend of "Highly Serialized Dramas" has officially run out of creative steam. The market has been flooded–the plot twist has fallen sharply against the dollar, and runs the risk of becoming so completely devalued as to be worthless. The story-reveal futures market has crashed as high risk short term cliffhangers fail to perform at their projected rate of return. Character development on already overdeveloped characters is being used as filler in order to plug leaking episodes. The outlook is bleak.
It's a ghost town. Late comers like last fall's "The Nine" are being told "Best to keep movin', youngster. There ain't no more ratings here fer you. Stick around here and all you'll get is canceled. Aint nothin' here but dust, and the souUUund of the wind."
"Prison Break", just finishing it's first full season of sucking, has been the perfect example. Its set up, if you didn't catch the previous season, was: Dude gets thrown in jail to help his brother (wrongly accused of killing the vice president's brother) escape. Dude has massive, intricate plan which gets more and more convoluted as various prisoners force themselves into it. Dude gets threatened by angry white and black people! Guards are mean! Meanwhile - massive conspiracy hinted at as friends on the outside try to prove Dude's brother is innocent. People get shot! Scary!
Obviously, they stretched it out for 22 episodes or so until the actual escape, and the narrative got pretty strained there a few times. You know what that looks like: "OH! Last minute reprieve! YAY! UH-OH! Massive setback! Threat of Death! AHH! Last minute reprieve again! YAAYYY!" But for the most part, it was still fun to watch.
Season two's concept plays out like this: Dude, Dudebrother, and 5 or 6 other prisoners escape. Magical airplane to fly them to panama takes off without them! FBI tracks them. Prisoners argue, fight, backstab, disfigure each other while trying to be the first to find BURIED TREASURE. OOOO! Meanwhile, massive conspiracy kills lots of people a lot. Other prisoners get killed one by one! Lots dead, creepy guys responsible. Dude & broher escape! Oops, they don't. They do! They don't again! They find evidence to blow the thing wide open! It's destroyed! They find more! It's faked! They find a witness! It's a trap! Wait, they escape! They really escape! Panama! They're proven innocent at the last minute! Its All Over! ***AWKWARD SILENCE*** OHH NO! SUDDENLY GUY FROM CONSPIRACY JUMPS OUT, GIRLFRIEND SHOOTS HIM, AND MAGICAL PANAMANIAN POLICE RUSH IN AND ARREST EVERYBODY FOR MURDER! Dude is BACK IN PRISON! TUNE IN NEXT FALL! PLEASE!
But really, my point in all this is that these shows, both the bad and the good ones (Lost, Prison Break, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, etc) have played a losing game with audiencs, creating huge elaborate back stories (or in the case of Prison Break's make-it-up-as-we-go-along second season, not so huge), and dribbling a meager portion out to the fans each week. The idea of generating excitement and repete viewing by trying to make an ever more sensational cliff hanger each week, and playing promos that claim, fraudulently, that the next episode will finally tell you whats going on - it can only work for so long. And I think we're seeing that "so long" is 2 to 3 seasons, give or take.
It isn't just that the audience loses faith, feels like they're being strung along for a payoff that's never coming. A bigger problem is that no matter how big the payoff actually is when it does come, they still feel cheated. Remember last season's Lost finale? Two hours of rip-roaring, other-shooting, hatch-exploding, Desmond-flashbacking madness? After it was done, I was thinking "yeah that was pretty crazy, but... wait that's it? That's all till next year? A purple flash and some fake beards?" Or this season's Battlestar Galactica finale. "Thats all? A Bob Dylan cover and some hallucinations?" It's like the writers are running up a debt of expectation, and the more they borrow against it, the more they'll have to pay for us to feel like we weren't waisting our time every week for up to 5 years. And that stuff is accruing interest. If, for example, Lost doesn't pick up the pace (it has been lately, but will it last?), then they'll have to end season 5 with a 6 hour marathon of pure, uninterrupted explaining. They wont even have time to make it a story. They might have to just get Hurley and Eko to stand in front of a white background and take turns saying "Ok, so this is what's gong on with (mysterious thing). Oh yeah, and that (mysterious character)? He/she was behind that. The (bizarre event) is because of that. The (random thing) doesn't mean anything, they where totally messing with you! Ha!" Etc.
______
I know, I've got a lot of things going on in my life, and after yet another month of not writing, I could be writing about so many other things. But this strikes me as important in a certain way. I hate it when an artform, thanks to the vision of a few, becomes suddenly meaningful again, and for a while it's inspiring, surprising, and fulfilling. And then it makes a killing, the artist(s) realize they've got a racket that they can drive into the ground, the copy cats show up, and suddenly the whole scene starts leaking its purpose out into a big, oozing commercial oil slick. And what is this space for, if not for rants?
Oh, my phone is back on finally. Good think too, because everyone assumes I know everything already. I've been out of the loop for more than a week. And the outside of the loop is a scary, cold place.
EKUNDAYO |
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| Something for the lost fans |
[Mar. 1st, 2007|12:35 am] |
I've figured it out - it explains so much!
The voice that does the promos for next week's episode right at the end?
He's one of the Others.
"...know this -- he will lie -- a long time. He will lie." |
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| Good Weekend |
[Feb. 26th, 2007|12:42 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Hellbent - Superdrag | ] |
Friday - uhh, yeah... don't quite know how to say this... my uvula was swollen. yeah. gross. made me gag constantly. I thought I was giving birth to an alien.
Saturday - better. felt good, had one of those huge small parties at my parent's place. we have this tradition of decorating the home with hand made paper cuts for Ayami-ha. this time we invited friends over, and suddenly the place was brimming with people, young and old (including Emilano & Kim's newborn son!). I made guacamole.
Sunday - ahhh the Oscars. the superbowl of cinema. It's always huge amounts fun to watch with friends, food, and open mockery of the proceedings. It's a grand spectacle, its a close race, and its always brutally unfair. Team Children Of Men got f*ing robbed, but I think we knew it was coming. Otherwise this year was a good show, funny, with some truly surreal moments thanks to Ellen's casually bizarre and fresh take on hosting. Highlights: coming down into the crowd to give Marty a script and make Speilberg snap a shot her and Clint for her myspace page. Even better: Walking up on stage after the powerful Dreamgirls medley, and saying, with a completely straight face, "Wow, I'd hate to have to follow them." Brilliant!
We, of course, and by we I mean the finest team of freestyle amateur surrealist satire hecklers and riffers in the greater Chicagoland area, including myself, Jon "Junkpuncher" Ellis, David "David Precht" Precht, Emily "Palomino tap-dancing Christ" Price, Lindsey "Rockstar" Lugsch, and Patrick "The Harbinger of Infinite Sorrow" Parish, and special guest player Tuck "The Coup-de-Ha" were in top form. We where knocking ourselves dead out there. And thats mostly what its all about.
This week, I'll be narrowly escaping from absolute professional failure and utter financial ruin. Stay tuned. |
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