Archive for December, 2006
Re-Splicery: Easy Steps to Stunning Success
The third entry in the Re-Splicery series, Easy Steps to Stunning Success, is now up for viewing in large, small, and lo-fi Flash and Quicktime formats. Take a look right here!
Re-Splicery #3: Easy Steps to Stunning Success
No commentsRe-Splicery: A Lo-Fi Peek at Number Three
Another brief update – as a little end-of-the-year gift, I’m planning to present the third video in the Re-Splicery series of (incredibly) short films. I just got word today that it’s been approved by Robyn Miller (the composer who’s been so kind as to loan his music to this project), so you can view a lo-fi version of this film, entitled Easy Steps to Stunning Success simply by clicking those orange letters. A larger, streaming Flash version should be up by year’s end. Right now it’s not on the main Re-Splicery page, but I thought I would give you guys an early look at it before it’s officially announced by Robyn later.
Screenshot from Easy Steps to Stunning Success.
No commentsGeneral News: Rounding the Loop Again
I’ve been planning for several months now to return to Iowa to live in Des Moines again, and as Christmas approaches, I intend to put those plans into action(!) In Iowa, I hope to work much more closely with Josh Schryver and Robby Ogden on upcoming musical projects. Also, in January, I am planning on launching a new site for my various news updates. Right now, it’s about halfway complete, so when it’s completely ready, I will post a link here at CardboardCanary.com. I will also hopefully have the Matt Maiellaro interview posted this next week.
The Tragic Cost of Convenience
Do you have a MySpace? As popular culture barrels ahead toward the next sparkling trend, the question is becoming increasingly common, as an aid to the pursuit. MySpace is now the most popular Web site in the United States, with over 107 million accounts and around 230,000 joining each day. With such incredible sign-up rates, it’s not difficult to guess just how convenient Web publishing has become, but what is buried out of sight to many people is the cost at which it has come.
The World Wide Web was invented in 1991, and, starting at age twelve, I have been publishing content through its ever-expanding wires for ten out of its nearly sixteen years of existence. At first, I remember that this relatively young medium attracted me because of its amazing versatility. When I was quite young I wanted to be a writer, animator, filmmaker and musician. So, rather than be confined to the limitations of an individual book, cartoon, flim, or audio recording, I decided to engage in the creation of all four mediums on the Web.
I began by learning the HTML language, and painstakingly hand-typing hundreds of lines of code to build my first Web site. Although this was a slow and frustrating process, I learned something beneficial in the process – The subject matter that I am publishing ought to be worthy of the amount of time and effort I am putting into its presentation.
While visual layout software like Macromedia Dreamweaver and GoLive Cyberstudio (Now Adobe GoLive) was soon made available to ease the task of HTML-grinding, I retained some of the discrimination I’d learned as I continued to push forward into more complex Web projects, becoming more careful with the material I published as I matured into my twenties. It was not expression itself that became valuable, but what was expressed. Of course, with a growing amount of social networking sites saying the opposite, I did find myself falling into some self-indulgence during the early years of my band, Cardboard Canary, when I was eighteen. Despite that, I learned from my mistakes, and, to me, technical skills gradually became a side note to quality content, and I hoped that others would recognize this as important as well.
But, when MySpace became a huge success around 2003-2004, no site I had seen in my then-eight-years of Web site design and browsing could probably have depressed me more. What the purported social networking site had done was put the power of Web publication into the hands of anyone who wanted it, many of whom had not a clue what HTML even was.
Although this convenience alone was not a terrible idea (in many ways, it could have been great), I cannot help but think that the ease with which people have been able to publish content has had a clear impact on the quality of it, due to the lack of effort required to produce it.
With the current trends of the majority of the population leaning toward the care-free, sing-a-long ethic of pop music, cloth-deep fashion statements, and the mindless entertainment of countless sitcoms, sports events and action movies, it’s clear that a lot of people have already been soaked in such an enormous load of sedatives that it has become a challenge to awaken and find even small scraps of thought-provoking material to digest.
A simple answer to the “why?” underlying the creation of this sad, surface-bound decay is, in my mind, likely the demand for it, created in part by hectic work/school days and other social problems. The desire to escape these mental and physical hurdle-zones is natural, but the length and method of escape has resulted in a mass of walking comatose patients, smiling and slumbering, with few seeking physicians. Why? Probably because it feels pretty good to be knocked out. After all, you don’t have to think, much like I didn’t have to think when producing four-chord pop music. In this state, it feels perfectly natural to judge a song’s worth based on its mere catchiness, a movie on its special effects, or a piece of food based on how pleasant it tastes, alone. Message and nutritional qualities, both mental and physical, have been tossed out the window in favor of simply, “what I like” and technical ability is praised without consideration for the product it builds.
The pieces are here today and they were ripe and ready back in 2003 when MySpace was launched. All the MySpace crew have had to do is assemble them in one convenient place, and point our anesthetic-craving population toward it. Now it’s easier than ever to reduce your multi-layered human self into a collectible object for others to enjoy.
Through the widespread, self-centered use of its photograph uploading system (not a bad thing in and of itself), MySpace users are gradually chipping away at the visual anonymity that has allowed physically unattractive people to be heard on the same level as those with model-like bodies. In lieu of thought-out, message-focused imagery, a seemingly endless wave of photos that scream, “look at my body” gently assaults visitors, and soothingly sucks them into the current of peer-pressurized, skin-level conformity.
Whatever actual thoughts survive this initial barrage, are left to the “blog” section of a user’s page, where many fall prey to the allure of mindless bantering, simply for the sake of being heard or not being bored. Complex topics rarely seem to receive their due respect, or in-depth analysis. Instead, the typical MySpace blog entry generally consists of a short paragraph or two, stating spur-of-the-moment thoughts such as, “check out my new pics” or “omg I hate George Bush, he is ssoooooooo stupid!” There may be a legitimate reason to think George Bush is stupid, but usually a thoroughly analyzed answer to the question of “why?” is nowhere to be found.
Those who don’t banter along the path of “I hate fill-in-the-blank” are often stuck on short tangents about what common activities they engaged in that day (i.e. “I ate _____ and it was yummy!!!”), posting cliché-ridden song lyrics, or filling out one of the hundreds of “answer fifty questions about yourself” quizzes being passed around.
Beyond these solo rants, equally inane comments are posted in response to them, consisting of casually tossed phrases like, “you’re a dick,” “you’re hawt,” “you rock,” “I love you,” and “you’re beautiful.”
It’s the “I’ll compliment you if you compliment me back” mentality, or “I’ll flirt with you if you flirt with me back.” Whichever you prefer. But, not to worry! If someone doesn’t play the way you like them to, you can always banish the insolent traitor from your friends list, causing the low-life bitch or bastard to lose another vital popularity statistic. After all, if you can gain an audience, it doesn’t matter by what means it is gained. It seems that the end justifies the means, and that tragic cost of getting there is buried beneath the glossy exterior.
So it is that eventually the crowd’s common desire for loads of attention has warped the tempting services of MySpace into a set of tools for do-it-yourself self-monument construction, complete with a shimmering trophy shelf with plenty of space to display the latest in my splendid achievements. A shelf for my beautiful face here, another for my simple (but important!) words here, the tasteful list of bands and movies I like there, and an especially large pedestal for my postage stamp collection of friendly faces – some whom I know, and some whom I’ve simply collected, with the count number 13,957 proudly displayed in bold along the top. If you’re lucky, you might even make it into my coveted “top 8” friends and garner the jealousy of thousands of others. It’s fast, it’s free, and there
’s hardly a reason not to do it.
So, do you have a MySpace? I do. And I’m in need of a few more colorful trinkets, if you don’t mind loaning me your face. You don’t? Ah, somehow I knew you wouldn’t!
No commentsA New Home for My Resplendent Name
Over the past months, I have received several hundreds of thousands of e-mails from people just like you who desperately want to know, “Justin, what are you doing right this second?” Of course, this came not as a suprise, since it has been that way for as long as I’ve been aware that my body was in existence. Indeed, a mere three seconds after my conception, all sorts of charmingly eccentric bacterial creatures began conversing with me, almost instinctively knowing that I was who I was destined to be, which, we all know is who I am now.
Of course, being this person – the man I am now, I felt compelled, as usual, to give my ever-loyal fanbase what they want more than anything – the answer to their never-dying, ever-rephrasable question: “Justin, what the sex are you up to?” Well, my friends, I’ll tell you what the sex I’m up to, and I’m afraid you’re going to love it so much that you might just wind up deleting that MySpace account of yours and hitting your browser’s “Refresh” button on this page for hours on end, just waiting to see what’s next!
To complete the daunting task of appeasing you fellows, I have taken it upon myself to allow three fortunate unpaid interns to dedicate their lives to documenting mine, via any means possible – whether this is by text, music, video, music video, pelicans, or semi-enriched wheat roll shavings. (Please don’t e-mail me regarding this as the lucky winners have already been selected from the ranks of several hundred competitors.)
The first step to bringing you pure Normanized bliss was the creation of a new Web site. Yes, I did play in the multi-platinum sellling, Grammy-Award-nominated Cardboard Canary(.com) band for three years of my life, but let’s face it, my friends. That frail, fluttering fowl, beautiful as it was, breathed its last long ago, and softly landed amongst the nettles where its cardboardian body was slowly devoured by the unkempt jaws of sixty-eight divisions of maggot colonies. It’s gone, my children, and it’s in a better place. Who wouldn’t want to live within the beautifully complex structure of a maggot’s digestive system anyway? I certainly wouldn’t turn down such an opportunity, and neither would the Canary. So, sleep well on that note.
This Web site will now serve as a shimmering jar, into which my interns and I have somehow managed to cram the great galaxy of Normanization in its near-entirety. This is no blog, oh no! Blogs are for people who like to write about their cats. This is a journal, the difference being that I use paragraph format and have a more sophisticated font. (Imitators take note: Make “Georgia” your new default. Women flock to Georgia.)
Just think about it. A galaxy in a jar. That, my friends, is a what I like to call a bad-ass metaphor. Indeed, the ass of that metaphor is so bad, it might even deserve to be elevated to the status of horrible-ass. In fact, I’ve just decided upon it. And the answer is yes. This site is going to be the most horrible-ass creation you’ve ever laid eyes, fingers, and hopefully nothing else upon. So, welcome friends. Take hold of the nearest comet and feel free to scream a bit. It’s going to be an amazing ride.
No commentsTracing the Seams: “A Treasured Technique”
Another piece of new writing from Wesley Norman is up at Tracing the Seams. This one was a long time in the making, and focuses on the rich/poor contrast. It’s a fitting piece of work for this season of traditionally obsessive shopping.
12 oz. Mouse: Interview with Matt Maiellaro
In a few days, I’m scheduled to do an interview with the creator/writer/voice actor for a television show called 12 oz. Mouse, which airs on Cartoon Network’s late-night progamming block, Adult Swim. Matt Maiellero has also written for Adult Swim’s long-running, 98-episode television show, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, among other things. If there are any other 12 oz. Mouse fans out there with questions related to the show, drop me an e-mail and I’ll see if I can get them answered! Eventually, I’m planning to publish the interview independently online, and perhaps get the 12 oz. Mouse fan site to post a link to it as well.
Images from the Adult Swim television show, 12 oz. Mouse.
No commentsUnwed Sailor: 2007 Tour Planned
Unwed Sailor is back in touring business with a few new dates already confirmed for January and February. Of course, I’ve posted those dates on their Web site, along with a new review of The White Ox by Black and White online magazine for all of your sparkling eyes to behold.
Photograph of Johnathon Ford by Jaret Ferratusco.
No comments