FriendBurst Blog

What would you do if someone entrusted you with his or her creative life’s work and you had the power to celebrate or denigrate it, and then you found it, meh… so so?

That is what happened to me 4 years ago this week.  When I bought my very first ukulele, I kinda charmed the owner of the small, independent music store from which I had bought it in Walnut Creek, CA. My new ukulele came with a free copy of the owner’s magnum opus (or only opus), Mirrors in the Rain. For the handful of you reading this who have followed me over the years, I beg your indulgence.  I know.  You’ve seen and read this before. The older this gets, the more it becomes a tribute and less a mockery.

What can I say about Mirrors in the Rain?  It is a “folk opera” revolving around the storyline of two young people whose love was so strong that it carried forward through many lifetimes and many places.  Thematically, it is moving, but not really new.  Musically, it is somewhat charming, but hearing the same chord progressions and melodies through 20 separate tunes, well, it gives the piece some consistency, but makes it hard to listen to because our minds become tired with any melody, however charming.  I admire the guy for HAVING a life’s work (something I can’t say I have… yet.), but objectively, there could have been more variety.

Now, what I did with Mirrors in the Rain was typical Joko stuff.  Enthusiastic celebration tempered with insouciant mockery.

It started 4 years ago today with a lunch hour away from my job at Countrywide Home Loans.  I was in the midst of a sort of rennaisaunce personal creativity, and I felt a need to put SOMETHING out in the time allotted me, and so this lip-syncing video was made as a sort of improv exercise in just a bit over 60 minutes.

Well, now that I had popped the cherry of making fun of Mirrors in the Rain, what else could I do with it?  A couple weeks later, I decided to take that same basic lip syncing theme and add some costumes and green screen effects… and so we had Mirrors In The Rain, Part Two. Enjoy!

For Mirrors In The Rain Part Three, I came up with what I though was a novel idea.  Back in 2007, YouTube was ripe with lip-sync videos.  Millions of people were having fun with simply taking one of their favorite tunes and recording themselves lip syncing it, and then posting it on the internet.  I’m sure this still happens quite a bit, but back then, this was somewhat of a new thing.  I wanted to turn the idea around.

Instead of unknown people lip syncing the tunes of famous artists, lets have famous vocalists lip syncing the tunes of unknown people!  My local music store owner and his “folk opera” qualified as an unknown person.

For the artists you’ll see in this video, they came from a mass e-mail to everyone in my office.  I didn’t say why except that it was for a video project I was planning for the weekend. The e-mail to the office simply asked for their favorite vocalists.  I also got some of the artists from my MySpace friends. How many in the video below can you identify?

Lastly, this third video was such an endeavor, and at the time, I was so into recording everything I did, Mirrors In The Rain, Part III, spawned two “making of” videos.  IN some ways, they are better than the actual videos from which they came.  They document the first instance of me having to go buy make up for one of my videos.

So that is it for Mirrors In The Rain until, perhaps, April of 2012…  Although I only used 4 of the 20 songs of the folk opera so far…