Confession time: So I don't really know how to type, other than like a bird pecking for worms in the dark. And I'm pretty lame at outlining my inner life on a page the way my favorite bloggers do so masterfully, but I'm determined to get some thoughts into this frikkin blog before I rest, dammit. I write as a professional story guy on occasion, but don't journal or log my world in any way except through fiction/drawn images, philosophical digressions, and quoting my betters at every opportunity.
Bear with me as I figure out what this page is meant to be "about". It's in search of a voice ... I hear something if not a voice. Gospel voices, of the First Baptist Church of God on Crenshaw Blvd in Inglewood, Kalifornia, USA. Once inside the halls of that place, we were all back in Munroe, Louisiana, population 40, 000 broke as hell, getting "cheeoouch" on a Friday night, sweating out a weeks worries -- aching hearts every one of us. But the choir was hot, brotherrs and sisterrs, and stirring up something ineffable -- speaking another language that the secret self alone understood.
I hear Deltron, Fat Freddy's Drop, and Cesaria Evora, Osunlade and Robert Johnson and Lightnin' Hopkins. And SIGN OF THE TIMES too, if I'm expansive. I don't know.
All that ol' lightweight ephemera. To describe it seems like hyperbole. As if I know what the hell I'm thinking when this stuff is generated. One jumps into these commercial gigs with the survivalist mindset on.
Fleeting edges of ideas from ages of art-directors needing whimsey or menace or last months stale eye-candy -- just like they have since the early twenties, btw. Collected from years of making pictures just to sell ideas to folks who had plenty of their own...And occasionally hitting on something interesting at the heart of a commercial spot, or animation technique.
The list of products and icons is insane, the ad-agencies, television programming departments, production studios is sort of interesting if you cut it up and switched all the letters around, I guess. I should try it, and see what wisdom can be seen there. But even that ironic voice of experience is shushed by the smallness of all these images. At least, until I look closely enough to see some musicality and that hint of blues sensibility -- finding a "way out of no-way".
So here's to finding a new way to see. A new eye.
-- let's go.
1 comments:
Hey ED we met once at Maverix. We hardly spoke but I certainly new who you were. Anyway what you have written here really rings true with me. I have been bouncing around the world of commercial animation for six or seven years since leaving New Zealand. What has been recently happening for me, and it seems many others, is this growing desire to speak clearly with ones own creative voice. Not some crazy twisted commercially synthesized version. How many commercial artists have a real sense of satisfaction at the end of a Job? Look forward to reading more of your thoughts HK
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