John Holdun

Week in Review #23: Happy birthday, Amy!

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:54:00 +0000

Amy Jacobowitz, my beloved partner and an avid reader of this blog, turns ## today! She just finished the first semester of her MFA in TV Writing at UCLA and I'm so proud of her and she's very cool. Here's a photo of her dog, Travis:

He's not ferocious. Just sleepy.

I cleaned the garage this weekend, organizing the absolute explosion I created between the rush at the end of Halloween and the rush to get all the Halloween stuff back into storage when the season ended. It's just barely organized enough now to get started on this year's Halloween project, which I have started planning and will tell you about next week probably. I also wiped down my bicycle and inflated the tires and took it for a spin around the neighborhood, which was the first time since again I think last Halloween season, when I was scoping for some creepy displays.

No music again this week uh oh, the streak is surely broken but I hope I'm not done for a long time again. Halloween could affect this but we will continue to find out together. Bye!

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:46:00 +0000

It just occurred to me that in the 1994 film The Lion King, when Zazu sings “This child is getting wildly out of wing,” that’s a joke about the expression “out of hand” because he is a bird. I think my kid brain just assumed “out of wing” was something grownups said sometimes and I didn’t question it for 32 years.

Week in Review #22: Thinking about a truck

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:07:00 +0000

In April of last year I reserved a Slate. It's a small electric pickup truck in development that emphasizes simplicity and ease of maintenance. I love the idea, it kinda looks like a Japanese kei truck, and the reservation was $50 and refundable. How could I refuse?

This past wekeend I finally got to see one in person! They're not in production yet so this is still a prototype. I wasn't allowed to touch it but I could look at it really closely.

Preorders begin in a few weeks: $250, non-refundable, but it locks in a delivery date which they are saying will be around March 2027. Supposedly if I don't act on the preorder, I'll move to the back of the line and would not have the option of getting one of these things until 2028.

I definitely don't need a truck, but I really really like this truck. There have been a handful of times over the four-ish years that I've been a car driver where I've wanted to move something that didn't fit in the car we have (a Prius Prime). Does it make sense to buy a whole new vehicle so that I don't have to rent a pickup from the neighborhood UHaul once or twice a year? Maybe…

No music this weekend. I made something on Sunday but I wasn't feeling it so I didn't record it. I guess that's how it happens sometimes!

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:27:00 +0000

For those of you who chart the weather by my watch band: I switched from leather to nylon today so now it is warm

Photos: Los Angeles County Fair, 2026

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:44:00 +0000

This was my first time visiting The LA County Fair! Of course I brought my Camp Snap.

Never quite figured out why this robot was at the entrance.

This is Thummer, the fair's mascot.

I was so excited to see my dear friends, the puppets of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater.

The expo hall full of the craft competition entries fascinated me. I spent a lot of time in here but it wasn't enough.

Tablescapes

Christmas trees

Fiber arts

MattressFirm had a sizable footprint at the fair.

The Budweiser Clydesdales

They should be safe by now

We watched the Pig Races, which also included ducks and sheep. It was hard to see.

I paid an extra $50 to stay for the concert: Evelyn “Champagne” King and The Zapp Band featuring Tuxedo. I was really just there for Tuxedo, who sounded great, but only played like three songs. I left as Zapp was starting “Computer Love” to check out the fairgrounds at night.

I tried to revisit a couple spots for matching day/night photos.

Just before leaving, I realized I missed a whole area in the far corner of the fairgrounds, including this very interesting indoor art installation.

I left utterly exhausted and got sick from tired the next day, but I had a blast!

See you next year!

Week in Review #21: Move Music

Thu, 28 May 2026 17:03:00 +0000

I'm a day late but don't worry about it. I updated my Music page to list all the new music I've been making in a dedicated spot. I called it "Jams Season 2" to differentiate them from the stuff I was doing in 2020-2023…not sure if the difference between that chunk of work and this chunk of work is apparent to anyone else but it feels quite different to me!

This most recent jam was the first one where I recorded to be edited for interest instead of focusing on a one-take performance, and without cameras, and I think it's a lot better for the change. I had a few flubs that would have either compelled me to start over or distracted me for enough time to make the flubs even worse, but knowing I could go back and repair things meant I got to keep moving forward and thinking about the overall composition.

This is also my first piece of music made with my newest toy: Ableton Move! I had decided a long time ago that Move's bigger sibling, Push, was too much interface for me, but this feels like an appropriate addition to my constellation of gear. It's pretty small, it works as an MPE controller which resolves that sidequest, and it integrates nicely with Ableton Live which potentially meshes nicely with my edit-afterwards experiments. The most important thing about it for me right now is that I can manipulate eight patterns on each of four tracks independently, leading to more complicated combinations of variations. On this jam I sequenced everything from Move but found it hard to toggle drum mutes, so next time I'm brining Digitakt back in to work alongside Move, which also means I get another melodic track to play with. I'm having fun!!!!!!!!

This weekend I went to the LA County Fair for the first time. I took some photos that I will upload soon and will use that collection to talk more about the experience, but suffice to say I had an absolute blast and am excited to go again next year.

Lots of code-y website-y stuff also swirling in my brain this week but nothing that I feel like musing about here for now so goodbye

Tue, 26 May 2026 01:35:00 +0000

As promised, here's your new Soundcloud-exclusive jam: Incoming!

Week in Review #20: Facing the music

Wed, 20 May 2026 16:32:00 +0000

Facing the music in a different direction, that is!

This is my twentieth weekly blog post documenting my fifth weekly jam. Nice. Now that I've done five versions of this music thing, I'm going to mess it all up a little.

Specifically, I don't think the video aspect is doing me any favors. It's a lot of work and it's just not that interesting to watch, especially if I'm not introducing new equipment for every jam or anything like that. I watch a lot of people make music on YouTube, but the big appeal for me in watching those is seeing some new piece of gear in use. These are not that.

By removing video, I also remove the pressure to get one continuous take. It's possible to tweak the audio track of a video in post, but if I want to reorganize or move things around or use a different take, it gets a lot more complicated. If I'm just dealing with audio, I have a lot more freedom, and the work is closer to regular music-making, which is the whole point of this. I still want to try to get one interesting 20-minute continuous take, but that's not the goal anymore. The goal is 20 minutes of interesting music, whatever process that calls for.

So I'm going to ditch YouTube for a while and just publish these to SoundCloud and my radio station. Did you know I have a radio station? All 40+ hours of music I've recorded are playing on it in a loop forever. I recently spruced it up along with the rest of my Music page, and it's now embedded there. Press play!

In a few weeks when I inevitably want to blow up the process again, I think I might try splitting the difference: audio-only, but live on the radio station! That would be stressful in a way I might enjoy.

I figured out the diorama, inspired by Gumby on a dachsund from last week and also a scene in an excellent clown show I saw this past weekend at the Elysian (which is playing again next Friday).

There's a creek cutting through the woods. A person is wading in the creek trying to coax their horse to walk through, tugging on its reins. The person is frustrated, thinking the horse is wary of the water, but we see what the horse sees and why it doesn't want to budge: a huge, unknowable creature on the other side of the creek, lurking just past the treeline.

I teased this last week and it's not quite finished enough to share more broadly, so I'll bury the announcement at the bottom of this post: I launched Episode Bottle! It's like Letterboxd but specifically for TV shows. You can mark the episodes you've seen to keep a running list of things you haven't seen yet. I watch a lot of TV and keep losing track of what's in progress, especially between seasons. It works nicely for solo use but it's still missing some "social" features that I want to add, like following, and maybe marking a show as seen on behalf of someone you watched with? Who knows! For now you can sign up and start using it if you want to, and email me if you notice anything weird or have ideas for improvements.

One last link: I fixed this little web toy I called Prince, inspired by Douglas D. Prince's "Photo-Sculptures." It's not obvious from the gallery but these are not multiple-exposure photos; they're multiple photos printed on transparent material and mounted with some space between them, so they have a bit of depth and parallax. I saw a bunch of these installed in the New York Public Library years ago and found them so entrancing. I made my tribute in 2014, initially on PutHTML (RIP PutHTML). At some point I moved it to my website and then that URL broke, so I fixed it and also changed the way it works to use real 3D, which maybe wasn't possible when I first made this.

Mon, 18 May 2026 16:25:00 +0000

Some straightforward house music for you: listen to Affirmative on YouTube or SoundCloud. Ah huh.

Week in Review #19: Gumby on a Dachsund

Thu, 14 May 2026 03:34:00 +0000

This past Sunday was the fourth installment in my new era of jams (I should just call them jams). I think it was pretty good, and it was also very different from the first three. I pre-arranged all the sequences and just turned them on and off and fussed with timbre during the set. This was mainly because, while rehearsing with “Cazenove” in mind, I ended up getting a couple patterns that I liked and decided I should just use them, rather than hoping that another attempt would be as good.

I had also already decided not to use any of my "expressive" controllers for this set—no velocities or mod wheels or aftertouches or nothing. I used the keyboard on the Digitakt to input some notes, but there's no velocity sensitivity, so it was very rudimentary. A couple pitches I just dialed in manually, programming rather than playing. This was due to having discovered that velocity and modulation really didn't factor into that BICEP song!

I also recorded a couple hasty vocal samples right before recording, just with a mic directly into the Digitakt inputs. I added a little bit of post-processing to the recorded samples but they're probably the most directly my voice has ever been used in one of my songs. Kinda scary. (The vocal treatment was more Overmono than BICEP, I think.)

So after realizing that these four jams were all so different, the next experiment I want to incorporate into this series is not being so different. I want to try to make something that's very similar to something I've made before, and I'll probably choose this most recent one. Because it felt successful, and also because everything is still set up for that one lol. So, same voices, maybe different drum samples, maybe I'll try composing during the set instead of before. Maybe I'll bring in the vocal processor. It can't be exactly the same. It can't be exactly in my Q zone.

I think I had a little bit of a breakthrough tonight on the diorama. The other day I arranged some of the dog's toys in the corner of the room just to entertain myself and realized I had created an intriguing situation. It's not exactly a narrative, but it invites a wonder about what the those critters are up to. It reminds me of a quote from Marc Davis, probably from his excellent bigass multi-volume coffee table book, I think from when he was working on punching up the animal scenes for the Disneyland railroad. He moved the existing beavers and foxes and squirrels around, not changing their appearance or poses or animations or anything, but simply put them together in groups of two or three. By implying a relationship between two otherwise-unrelated characters, you get a story! (I took a photo of the dog toy scene to share here but then decided I don't want to lol sorry)

I've also spent a lot of my idle time this week on a piece of software, to complete the trifecta of my hobby genres. It's something I started thinking about a few years ago and haven't done much with apart from continuing to renew the clever (imo) domain name. I think the first version is just about ready to launch, maybe before next week's update. I won't say too much about it yet but let's just say that if you wished you had a Letterboxd for Television and weren't satisfied with the many Lettersboxd for Television that are already out there, you might like this thing. But that's all I'll say for now! You can try to connect those dots yourself! Have a nice week!