Welcome to RBM

The fellow writing this stuff.

No one presumes to give a dance recital without having first mastered the rudiments of dance, to perform Mozart before playing scales or to enter a weight-lifting contest without first hoisting weights. Yet because we've been reading since age five, we blithely assume we can read: because we scrawled our signature when six, we glibly aspire to write.

~ Nicholas Delbanco

Hello World.

My name is Jordan and this is my blog. I am a post-production media technician and editor who resides in Los Angeles. I read a lot about media and have my own thoughts on it, which has brought me to create this website, which also functions as my portfolio.

I've had a few rounds of the first post and I have settled on the decision of choosing to go ahead and putting this out there. In this age of optimization of all sorts - via depictions, portayals, and projections via the devices of screens, fiber optics, Wi-Fi, algorithms, and LEDs - there is a constant push of this idea that life is to be lived via how people on our screens live them. And as we've seen, daily life as we know it is much more complex than that. We have developed anxieties, judgment, and worry from the orchestrated "documentaries" of narrativized projection into our lives which bear much more resemblance to Cinéma vérité. It's imperfect.

So this blog is my way of embracing that and sharing through my expertise how to find a way through the noise through what I know about media.

I've watched and engaged with media my entire life, from the time I grew up in Kansas watching Adventures in Odyssey and Bibleman on VHS to moving to LA during the pandemic and getting wonderfully sucked into the vaccuum cleaner of the repertory cinefile scene of northern Los Angeles. I have also curated a secondary passion of listening to a lot of music over my life, from listening to the background worship tunes of KLOVE in my family's car on the way back home from church and discovering Daft Punk in my friend's truck as he drove me back from high school to going to a synthesizer and pedal expo with my friend Dave to learn about Make Noise modular synthesizer modules and swaying to Black Moth Super Rainbow at the Belasco theater. This is very much just me describing the tip of the iceberg from the POV of binoculars on an Arctic vessel, but all that is to say that I've had a wide variety of experiences with the different mediums through which Audio and Video media have been shared with us during our present lifetimes.

For a bit of my background, I have a Bachelor's (B.G.S.) in Film & Media Studies from the University of Kansas with a minor in Global & International Studies. I've worked as a freelance editor and assistant editor for about 10 years now, with 6 years of my career having been in primarily the social media cotent and advertising industry in Los Angeles. I was also in the United States Air National Guard for 10 years, where I performed my enlisted duties as a Geospatial Imagery Analyst. That former career was fascinating for my own professional development, as I have incorporated a lot of skills and knowledge that I learned from my time in the miltary into my present workflow in Post-Production.

So while this post is very much me writing off of the cuff, I hope that I can communicate that I extend a warm invitation to anyone coming to read my thoughts on this website. I definitely believe that the world deserves agency with the presence of media in the world today, and I believe that comes through literacy and knowledge about how it works.

~Jordan