The hip hop sound gotta get... funky!

Listening to the new Q-Tip album, he's taking a ride on to the Obama bandwagon, why shouldn't he, he's not one of the gangsta hoppers.
Anyhow, he's proclaiming a funkier hip hop sound. Fine by me! Bring som JB-grooves into the hip hop, that would be a lot cooler tnah the synth trend goin down right now.
Q-Tip, the man most famous for "I left my wallet in El Segundo" from circa 1990 is back with an album that sounds great on first impressions. I listened to that song back then, thinking it was some place out in Mexico. When visiting LA '07 I realised El Segundo was one of the small hoods of LA. Anyhow, here's a Q-Tip track:

Entourage Season 5 # 3

Entourage is really picking up, and Ari (Jeremy Piven) triumphs as the super-cynical agent from hell. This might be the best Entourage episode so far. Piven is destined for stardom. Major movies gotta be coming up for this actor.

3D Burger Guy okay

New 3D work

Flash gets Flashier

Went to an Adobe CS4 presentation today, the hottest thing is that Flash has inherited some of the coolest animation- and simpler 3D features from After Effects.
They are generally working a lot to improve the workflow in all the programs. Photoshop also had some new features lifted off from AE.
Indesign has this feature where you can make a Flash presentation, but do the layout in Indesign. Interesting.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/features/?view=topnew

Jonn Unlegendary

Usually I don't diss stuff, but this guy has really disappointed me. His first album was great. The second was tame. The new one's lame. He does a little bit of everything, a reggae song, a club song, a ballad. The sound reminds me of a ten year old illustrated Disney movie. The guy's lost track totally. Sad. Today I bought tickets to an upcoming Al Green show in Stockholm in November. Now there's a soul artist who's got a green light to call himself a legend.

The future is electric

Since I sold my gigantic gasoline-gulping SUV, I've been saying my next car's gotta be electric. Now, the electric options aren't around yet. What is out there now is the small size Toyota Prius and crossover SUV Lexus RXH 400. Both bipowered electricity/gasoline, where the gas engine kicks in around 20 mph/30 kmh. Which kinda sucks, because they both still are gas cars. You can get an Escalade with the same hook-up, but they are still quite thirsty, saves maybe 30% of the usual consumption.
Now GM's had over 200 engineers working day and night (it is said, might be a marketing ploy) to get an electric car out real soon now. The Volt was introduced a few months ago and I read somewhere it was ugly like the Prius. It should be on the market in 2009, it is promised. Now I came across some pictures, and I thought it was the new Camaro. The car looks pretty great! I want that! Congrats GM!

Mitch O'Connell

Wow, sometimes you stumble across illustrators who have this incredible super-flow about them. Mitch O'Connell is one of them. As George Michael would have said: Too Funky!

3D Fashion-Guy

He's fashion Guy! This one about text ads for webstores in editorial text.

3D-rooster finished

Working hard in Z-Brush, getting some resluts:

Chocolate News: Hip Hop is Dead

Funny, smart, cool, hip hop humour for black people and all wiggas out there in suburbia (from Comedy Central):

3D-rooster

This new guy coming up for Swedish biz-2-biz magazine about magazines:

Apple's delivery policy

Now my headphones on the Iphone has gotten kinda wacky. The volume on one plug is down to half of the other. So I ordered a new guarantee-pair on their website, great, delivery next day, by a brown UPS-truck. Now, these headphones only cost 184 crowns (25 bucks). So I am at work, downtown. What happens? The UPS person can not leave the headphones in the mailbox, it has to be a personal delivery. They try this for 3 days. Now they've ended up in a UPS warehouse somewhere. I just wonder how much this must cost? Apple must have lost the profit on my phone just on these UPS costs. And how environmentally friendly are those big brown trucks? Surprisingly silly! Steve, are you in on this?

Henry Poole Is (not) Here

Been watching this very slow, quite pretentious movie for two nights on my Iphone. It's starring Luke Wilson, so I thought it would be good. Now I've seen 2/3rds of it, and all I can think of is if the church somehow sponsored it? I wouldn't recommend it, it is very depressing, even though it's set in LA, with palmtrees and all. Luke plays it in the Duchovny school, by the way, same squint, and kind of deadpan acting.

Finished 3D illustration

I put the speed reader Woody-character in a photo I took today of a book on my kitchen table. The book is by the way "Byt Namn" by a friend of mine named Klas Ekman.

The Financial Crisis?

I do 3D while the Economy crashes

Hey, check out this 3D character I'm pretty proud to present:

The new BOMB-track (Bond track, I mean)

I read in a Swedish tabloid that the new Bond theme from Alicia Keyes and Jack White sucked. So I believed it, and didn't bother checking it out. Now I came across it, and it is great! Now, when Jimi Hendrix reincarnate Jack White is joining forces with Aretha Franklins little soul-daughter Alicia Keyes, things just can't go wrong. Sure it's over the top, sure it's larger than life artists with humongous egos just doing their superstar thang. So what, it's showbiz at its best. Enjoy:

AC/DC:s Black Ice

Just heard the new ACDC album Black Ice. Sounds awrite, a few tracks, maybe 5 of them, are really good. The rest are more fillers, but anyhow, how many 60 year olds do you know that can produce classic kick ass rock'n'roll? The tracks that are best are the ones where they allow themselves to cool down, maybe let the all instruments go quiet except the drumbeat for a few seconds. Many songs have a tendency to be overproduced, and they get annoying quickly. ACDC are best when they strip down the sound like on Back in Black for instance. On one song the singer Brian Johnson sings in his regular voice, without pitching it up. Strange! But Okay! They will be touring summer of '09. Should be massive, but maybe not so thrilling.
Here's a video of the first single Runaway Train. Sounds like AC/DC...

New 3D work in progress

Z-Brush is just so much fun to work with. After having been working for 19 years in Illustrator (started at newspaper Expressen in 1989) it sure feels like a paradigm shift, as Dilbert would say. Here is a new character for magazine illustration about speed reading:

Why D'oh I think this is funny?

http://unique-strange.blogspot.com/2008/09/simpson-alone-in-his-journey.html

3D progress

I'm pretty happy about my getting into 3D, doing some progress. Here is a study of Swedish cartoon character Bamse in 3D program Zbrush:

Fire her PR-agency

The Republicans should get a new media training agency for Sarah Palin. This is just so cheap and banal. Who should be inclined to liking her more because she winks? Or did she come up with it herself? That would even be worse...

Me gettin' into 3D # 2

Happy with my first more serious 3D-study. Bamse is a famous Swedish cartoon character. Will colour him, and try to add a furry effect. Finally I could get the eyes as separate materials. Love Z-Brush, great program!

Palin goin' down

Wow, missed this. SNL spoofs Palin again, from an interview with Katie Couric, where rumours were out that Palin came out as incoherent. Well, here's proof, Tina Fey basically reads the rambling answer Palin gave, with minor changes, and one thinks its parody. In this clip, we can see the spoof, then the real Palin side by side. This is embarrassing. Palin can't handle the pressure, and just rambles on, mixing in all possible messages into one answer. She probably thought something like: I just say all I've been trained to say, and make it sound complicated, and I might get away with it, you know; politician speak!
Well, congrats Obama...

StepBrother Crack-Up

I've watched about half StepBrothers on my Iphone in bed, and am glad to tell you Will Ferrell hasn't become Chevy Chase yet, he's still the NEW Chevy Chase. This one is fun in the same vein as Ton Hank's BIG. Adults playing 10 year old boys. And being a father of one 11-, and one 9-year old boy, this movie is full of fun scenes at least I recognize totally. If you dig Will, and liked him and John C. Reilly in Talladega Nights, this is as funny, I'll vouch for the first half.