New OJ Site

To get ready for the blip.tv launch, www.orlandosjoint.com has gone thru a major overhaul. If you haven’t seen the slick new layout yet, check it out! I’ll be moving Notes from the Joint over to that site, so be sure to subscribe over there.

And spread the word, the Orlando’s Joint run starts this Wednesday June 17…

OJ Twitter Page

I just set up a new page for Orlando’s Joint on twitter: http://twitter.com/orlandosjoint1. I’ll be posting when episodes drop and other OJ info, and promise to try to keep updates about what I ate for breakfast to a minimum. Thinking I might just delete the old MySpace page… is anyone still on that thing?

New ‘Toon In The Works

I’m working on a new animated short that I hope to drop in a couple weeks. Not gonna say too much about it yet… but it’s based on a play I wrote a couple years ago. And here’s a peek at the characters:

Yo

Been quiet on here of late, but I’ve been busy. I’ll be posting some news about a new animated project I’m working on… and later on some updates about future Orlando’s Joint stuff. In other news, this vid made me chuckle:

more about “Yo“, posted with vodpod

What I’m Watching: Aceyalone

Aceyalone’s latest just dropped. I expect it to be getting a lot of playtime during writing sesh’s for the next while:

Phoenix Is Genius

I think all the recent Joaquin Phoenix weirdness is gonna turn out to be one of the greatest “performance” events since Andy Kaufman started inter-gender pro-wrestling. Phoenix’s fight with an audience member at his concert in Miami just cemented for me that his slide from Oscar-nominated actor to crazy white-boy rapper is just too perfect to be really real. Is it a coincidence that his buddy Casey Affleck has been shooting a documentary about him this whole time? After watching Phoenix’s disturbingly comatose state during his David Letterman interview, I sure wanted to see a movie about what the hell is going on with him.

I could be wrong — he won’t be the first successful guy to go off the deep end (Howard Hughes, Gary Busey, Gary Coleman… ok, I just stuck Gary Coleman in there for a laugh…). But if I’m right, he’s really upped the ante for guys like Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen took on the character Borat and created crazy real-life situations to place him in without breaking character — but Phoenix has spent months transforming his whole life into the crazy situation.

Here’s Joaqin rapping at a party around the time he announced he’d be releasing a rap album:

Here is the infamous Letterman interview:

And here’s the performance and fight in Miami:

Yeah, you got me, Phoenix… I’ll pay money to see that documentary!

Win a Bumpie T-Shirt

Contest time! Get an exclusive Bumpie t-shirt (these aren’t even for sale on the site!) by answering this skill-testing question: What is Bumpie’s real name?

Stumped? Well start clicking around the Orlando’s Joint site, see if that helps…

To enter to win this dope t-shirt, send an email to: mail @ orlandosjoint.com with the following info:

• Your name
• Your mailing address
• Shirt size
• The correct answer

All the entries I get by Sunday March 8 will go in the drawing, the lucky winner will be contacted by Monday. Good luck, suckas!

What I’m Watching: Raphael Saadiq

Saw him at the House of Blues last night, the guy’s a serious performer — just what I needed. For some reason his youtube videos have the embed option disabled, so check out this interview:

And some old skool Tony! Toni! Tone!:

Live From Wondercon

12:28 PM: It’s a rainy day in San Fran for the last day of Wondercon. The crowd is still pouring into Moscone Center — pretty slow for me so far today (lots of kids too young to be corrupted by OJ), but I’m keeping hope alive. This is the first time I’ve had a table at a convention, and I gotta admit I was nervous after seeing that scene in The Wrestler of Mickey Rourke hawking stuff at a little legion hall with other wash-outs. But it wasn’t as scary as I thought — yesterday just when it would get real boring, someone would come up and buy some stuff, get excited about my ‘toon, and that would make it worth it.

I’ll be updating this post as the day goes on (if my laptop battery holds up) so keep checking back.

2:43 PM: Just a got thru a mini-rush of DVD sales, so I’m in a good mood for now. My table is not in primo real estate in Artists Alley, but at least I’m sitting next to some cool guys. To my right is illustrator extraordinaire Stoner Dude (a brand new Orlando’s Joint fan!):

To my left is David Mack, creator of the Kabuki graphic novel series and a writer on Daredevil (I’m a new Kabuki fan):

6:39 PM: Man I am burnt out. I just got to SFO. Wondercon ended on a slow note for me sales-wise, but in the end I pretty much broke even. I’ll assess the success of this whole trip after I’ve caught up on sleep, but right now I can’t shake the feeling that I didn’t sell as much as I wanted to.

Inspirational moment of the day: an older black guy came up to the table, watched a few seconds of the Orlando’s Joint video playing on the portable player, and bought a DVD right away. “I want to support you, ’cause there’s no one else here like you doing stuff like this.”

RIP Octavia

I remembering hating Wild Seed when I read it as a young(er) wannabe writer. I couldn’t put it down, though. The problem was, Wild Seed had some elements that were close to an idea I had for a script at the time — except way better. It happens to most people (“I had an idea to do a show about a psychic lawyer years ago…”), but the worst is to witness someone else executing that idea way better than you could ever dream of.

Wild Seed is still one of the few books that stand as a fencepost to what I’d like to reach with my own storytelling. Octavia Butler seamlessly wove race and history into a kick-ass story about immortals, love and power. She was one of the first black writers that made me realize incorporating identity and culture into a story doesn’t mean you have to give up strong narrative (it should actually be the opposite), and that sci-fi can be as black as it wants to be, dammit.

You’ll be missed, Ms. Butler. I still have that damn book on my shelf — time to torture myself and re-read it.