BURNING SHORTS --Its History ... Mystery ... Revealed ...

HEAR ... the online audio-cast

 
 
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BURNING SHORTS THEATER* --

Design YOUR Local Burning Shorts Theater ... to Advance YOUR Local Creative Community ...

Contact Us.

This is it.

*BURNING SHORTS THEATER SECRET UNLOCKED

 

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Online works for smart humans ... since 2006

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 ISSUE 20 - JULY/AUGUST 2008  CELEBRATE BURNING SHORTS THEATER    
 

Let us celebrate your Creativity ... through Burning Shorts Theater and, thanks to Film-maker and multi-talented friend Bobby White, http://home.earthlink.net/~bobbywhiteco/Resume.html ... 

DANCE!!!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user 

 ISSUE 19 - JUNE 2008  AWARENESS TEST 
 
The voice says, "This is an awareness test ..."

Then, the words "Awareness Test" appear on screen.

Watch carefully.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=oSQJP40PcGI

Above all, "Awareness Test" challenges all who seek to advance original online video arts. As the video says, "It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for ..." This video challenges us to expand mightily what we are looking for in original online video arts. Here, Burning Shorts, we have surely tried, and we will continue with even greater intensity as a result of the challenge issued by "Awareness Test".

The video illustrates the idea that the answer is before you provided you have asked yourself the right question. Or, you have the appropriate intention. Or, both. Currently, in original online video arts, the common question I hear is "What’s the Business Model???" So Alexa, Google Analytics, other resources are answering how many times the ball is passed on the assumption that traffic leads to money. Yet, "Awareness Test" warns us that to do so to the exclusion of other qualities ... like artistic merit ... is perilously narrow at best.

 

 ISSUE 18 - APRIL/MAY 2008  A SERIES FOR THE WORLD AND ... ALL 
 

Erik The Librarian Mysteries: A Series the World Has Been Awaiting!

As he listens in bliss to music on headphones, moving (dancing?) wildly down the sidewalk, Erik screams, terrifies another pedestrian, "The collective emotional wisdom of the ages, and you can get it for free at the library!!!" (Episode 3, "The Secret of Burl Ives" at http://www.60frames.com/series/movie/Nw==/NDM www.60frames.com.)

This is a series the world has been awaiting.

Erik, twenty-something, played by Charles Neilson, the librarian may be somewhat bi-polar, lost in literary brain fog, or both. He is in love with the patron who forever is trying to retrieve her car keys she left behind. The main reference librarian and the man who is going calmly insane trying to study for the GRE in dysfunctional library chaos mainly produced by Erik comprise the cast.

Slick and smart: Brent Forrester’s series is referred to as "Erik The Librarian Mysteries" ... The "mystery" is why it is called a "mystery" (nothing in the episodes clarified), and whether "Erik the Librarian" was entitled with rhyme and meter of "Conan the Barbarian".

And, in the center we have Erik. Just as Robin Williams expressly acknowledged his master Jonathan Winters; just as Johnny Carson acknowledged his master Jack Benny; similarly with Jim Carey and Jerry Lewis, Erik is doing a hyper-geek Wallace Shawn. And it is beautiful. The supporting cast is/are exquisite.

The series appears on 60frames: take me to lunch, and I’ll go into the subject of the site as a whole. For present purposes: hurray for 60frames! In addition to Erik, there are other other series or anthology episodes that really lead the original online entertainment Parade today at 60frames. (Even the adjacent Google ads are ironically funny.)

About 60frames, I say, "God bless ‘em ..." About "Erik the Librarian Mysteries", I say, "Give us more!!!"

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Surfing the Creative Web Wave: The Raw The Naked The Vulnerable ... At The [Turning] Point

To begin ...

Behold ... http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Bodyboard%2BPipeline/video/x1cmo3_bodyboard-pipeline-shorebreak_extreme

Cold, Wet, Dawn ... in the ocean at a fine point break in So Cal. Among surfers, this is "Dawn Patrol".

1972.

One other in the water with me. He paddles to me, asks, "Hey, Man, how old are you?"

"Twenty," I reply.

"Gaawd ... that’s old," he says.

Next month, Burning Shorts turns two, and I think, "Gaawd ... that’s old." Current "Web2.0" Era, that is old. Ah, and currently too, I am still in the ocean daily at a fine point break, and I ride waves that are both fresh, universal and eternally renewed.

Riding waves is creative expression.

And ... Burning Shorts must be the point break for the Digital Arts Dawn Patrol. Like the surfer, the artist is raw, naked, and vulnerable in a vast ocean, and needs a glassy, clean point break where artist can inspire us to feel the fresh, the universal and eternally renewed.

So ... this is to declare that Burning Shorts hereby expands beyond online video to all online creative expression ...

Original video, site-as-art, song lyrics, best of the blogosphere, forms yet to be invented ... all online creativity passionately sought and supremely welcome.

 

 ISSUE 17 - MARCH 2008  OUR FINGERS IN OUR NOSTRILS 
 

"A Bunny Situation" and Editorial on the State of Online Video: Our Fingers In Our Nostrils

As promised today to and for JT, here is digital animation reported by our one of our Visionary Editors as done by a single person ...

"A Bunny Situation" www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFuitd30vH4 

Editorial

 

photo www.meetthesqueegees.com/fun.html 

We enjoyed the HanDonks especially the Oogum Boogum performance poem of their landing page! www.handsomedonkey.com. So we were excited when we learned that www.abc.com was to launch the HanDonks' new series "Squeegees". 

So, episodes 1 through 5 of "Squeegees"  ... um ... has "potential"? "Potential" to grow into a character-driven irreverent verbal and physical comedy ... you know, like those Marx Brothers ... they were pretty good?

Or ... is www.meetthesqueegees.com from whom our illustration above is borrowed unintentionally a great deal more funny?

Like our visual commentator above: we keep our nose plugged and hope for the best.

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Welcome back, Brother Jim!

 

 ISSUE 16 - FEBRUARY 2008  GRAND CENTRAL DECLARATION 
 

Hello! What's This? 

Time Stopped In Grand Central Station!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo

The brilliant ImprovEverywhere* used only human cooperation: humbling and inspirational!

We are inspired by this glorious video to see and to declare: Our Mission is to bring online works to smart humans.

Recalling our birth in Issue 1 way, way back (nearly two years ago!) and squinting ahead into the Global Brain Fog that obscures the Future, we see we strove, strive, and aspire to the Mission we can now express ... declare! 

Those who have been with us know that we have grown, and it is a joy to behold Frozen Grand Central unfreeze our ability to express that which has motivated us until now and that which forever will remain our aim.

*http://www.improveverywhere.com/

 

 

 ISSUE 15 - START 2008  GRATEFUL DEAD PREDICT BURNING SHORTS 1972! 
Can it be true? 
The Grateful Dead predict Burning Shorts in 1972?

Introducing the Dead, May 7, 1972, The Bickershaw Festival, UK:

" 'For all our muddy friends

THE GRATEFUL DEAD.'

Thus spake the announcer as the Dead launched into "Truckin'" - the start of a mammoth 245 minute show . . ." during which, this:

"After RAMBLE ON ROSE, the band comment on the stink from the dozens of fires.

Unknown band member: "What's on fire"

Weir: "I don't know what you're burning out there , but it smells rotten."

Phil? "It must be my shorts ... " 

Below mid-page and just following "After RAMBLE ON ROSE ..." http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/dead.html 

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So, we embrace this opportunity to honor hippie heroes and true creative visionaries: Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Jerry Garcia with Kesey, all as today's internet can only make possible.  

Indeed, there is such a wealth of content that what follows is a mere taste. Humble thanks to Web2.0 for providing us with such wealth.

In a recent Flaming Arrow, we mentioned our encounters personally with Leary, as he was an early, passionate, digital media evangelist: "Turn on, tune in, boot up ..." as he said. 

The recipients wanted more: You got it! We spent a weekend with Hunter S. Thompson; we interviewed Kesey; and we had a most memorable conversation with Garcia. That was a while ago.

Yet, time only illuminates more brightly just how swashbuckling these creative visionaries were and, as inspirational figures, important to our current mission: to commit heart and soul to advance the Human Adventure unfolding in digital media. 

It is therefore a personal pleasure to bring you the following homage: 

Timothy Leary: Psychedelics as sacraments; coat and tie era for Tim; black and white television clip; 42 seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HclVTYUQV-M . Then, Tim circa 1980 and ambushed by television interviewer. Behold Tim's commitment to gentleness and remaining open and non-defensive. 10 minutes 18 seconds and worth it. And he tells the interviewer to go "back to Iran"! Close to a hundred K views on this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT31oB2vspw&feature=related Nearing death in 1995, Tim provides advice for all of us: ""You have to go out of your mind to use your head." Part of a series of length, captivating interviews by Paul Krassner. E.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-KAmpXsdUE 

Hunter S. Thompson: Hunter was surely big fun back in the day. Here we have Hunter struggling with intimations of mortality and just perhaps hatching a plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r31hV_BPFf0&feature=related  ... For an accurate tribute to Dr. Gonzo, it would require the unique verbal intensity and apparent psychic chaos of another we met ... Gary Busey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-rE0dNV5Bo&feature=related 

Ken Kesey [and the Merry Pranksters]: Seeking to visit Leary (they were all connected with each other ... just not on this day, but see Garcia and Kesey below). Look for the "Further" sign on the front of Kesey's bus. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcstOdT1Pe0 

Jerry Garcia with Ken Kesey: Interviewed by the strangest of all, the late Tom Snyder ... captured herein (Live, NBC Studios, New York City, May 7th, 1981)  is a trace of the infectious joy and silliness that fueled the era: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ilnADvT2s 

 

  ISSUE 14 - 2007 ENDS WITH A ZUNE!
Zune Journey: we just may have a masterpiece at http://www.zunejourney.net/ .

Please know and remember that the visitor controls the velocity at which one moves as well as the angular direction: Fast and straight is spectacular and even more so is slow with angular exploration.

Standing still is also fascinating: what a tribute to an interactive digital artwork.

This is a work, a Journey, of glorious kinetic, visual richness, and it is recursive in that the visitor-guided Journey moves through phases which repeat. Yes, the refrain from a song or, more accurately, the variations on a melodic theme in a symphonic movement repeat; however beautiful such musical repetitions or recursions may be, the listener remains passive. In Zune Journey, the visitor fully shapes navigationally all variations of each thematic return, and all occur seamlessly.

Zune Journey’s music, specifically, is a series of linear songs which are diverse yet supportive of the visual, self-propelled adventure, both in brisk forward mode and in thematic visual variations.

In design, there is an early ancestor of Zune Journey by Cyan called The Manhole.

Regarding The Manhole, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole. Regarding Cyan and its legacy, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyan_Worlds
While The Manhole was a children’s game and thus simplified, the visitor moved in and through a recursive journey, as with Zune.

I had the privilege to represent Cyan during its most celebrated years circa 1993-1997, the period of Myst and Riven, the hauntingly beautiful, completely innovative, and exquisitely shaped works of interactive fiction for the personal computer. During its era, Myst was the best-selling computer game in history.

The Manhole was a very early work, and yet its innovative creativity alerted the player to the Cyan brilliant imagination which bloomed fully in Myst and Riven.

It is, therefore, both a personal and editorial pleasure to recommend Zune Journey, this native online work (hence available free and worldwide, though unobtrusively in service of a commercial product), which is uniquely beautiful.