Otis Funkmeyer, The Ph.D. of Popping

A narrated history of streetdance told through YouTube clips. Historic moments in the dance–performances, battles, new moves developed, etc. Brief segments from interviews, and then at the end, a short explanation of each style and what gives it it’s characteristic look and feel.

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It’s nice the way that when you get into the groove, life just unfolds. I’ve been in this groove for quite some time now, but it’s almost impossible to foresee just how beautiful it can be. Reconnecting with old friends and finding relationships to be stronger than they ever were, or on the other hand, reconnecting and realizing that a certain type of energy has no place in your life anymore. Either way, the sense of possibility, abundance, and empowerment that I just feel exuding from every pore of the universe is really incredible.

So I started writing this post having no clear idea of why I was writing or what I was going to write, but now, all of a sudden, it’s clear. My wonderful roommate Tyson told me to checkout the movie The Secret and so I watched it last night and then again tonight. All throughout the movie, I felt this sort of surge running through me where I just wanted to sit up and scream and explode and burst into tears and laughter and just marvel at the beauty of this thing we call life.

And I realized that I want my life to be big. really Really REALLY big. I want to be on the cover of Fast Company. I want a house in the Hills. I want a media room and a top of the line Apple and a Silver Toyota Prius and an energy-healing, genius, loving, thoughtful, humble, boisterous, outgoing girlfriend who looks like a combination between Aishwarya Rai, Penelope Cruz, and Denise Richards, who loves me to death and just can’t get enough. I want to have sex and lots of it and meaningful sex and playful sex and rough sex and healing sex and I want to heal and I want to do the full splits in both directions and I want to tour around the world in the Lincoln and Kennedy Centers and in Paris and London and Berlin and St. Petersburg and China and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Australia and Morocco and South Africa and Egypt and Israel and Brazil and Argentina and have the most incredible show any of these cities has ever seen with Elastic Illusion. I want learn2breakdance.com to be the site that propels breakdancing into the mainstream and makes the dance constituency stand up and take note. I want articles written about it in Dance Magazine and Dance Spirit and I want Nike and Apple and Starbucks and The Gap to come running to us wanting to get their piece. And I want all the while to live solely for God. To know that this is the unfoldment of what I am here to be doing. To be attached to none of it and to be willing to die at any moment, knowing that I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. And I want a scooter and a bicycle and to live near a coffeeshop and a bookstore and I want to hang out at the bookstore with my girlfriend and make out in the aisles and have quickies in elevators and just be wild and crazy and full of life and energy and give all kinds of money away and support projects that I know are going to change the world. To support bootstrappers and to tell people that they too can do this. That it’s ok. That the haters don’t matter. That the idea of charging a lot is good. That the idea of taking a lot is good. That receiving is giving. That giving is receiving. That we are hear to be abundant and to give. TO GIVE TO GIVE TO GIVE.

And so now I will post pictures onto my virtual Vision Board here at otisfunkmeyer.com and you will see how each and everyone of these things, as long as they stay in my desire, come easily and effortlessly into my life, and you will realize, I can do it too.

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Everyday, it seems to dawn on me more and more how many choices Elastic Illusion and Learn2Breakdance face in terms of vectors. Meaning, what direction do we want to head in. What direction is the internet heading in. What direction is the world heading in. It seems like making the right choices is pretty important, because while we can change course fairly easily, if we make the right choices the first time, it will make everything else a lot easier.

The choices really come down to pricing and grouping. At first, I had thought we would basically release a variety of online DVDs for a variety of subjects and charge DVD prices for them. Then the idea of monthly memberships came into being. Then the idea of combining the subjects and charging a flat rate. Then the idea of combining the subjects and charging the same price for all of them that we had planned on charging for each of them. Now, a new idea is to give them all away and insert 10-second advertising in front of each clip and make the money off of ads.

Each of these approaches has pros and cons. Beginning at the end, as is my style, if we give everything away, we are sure to drive a lot more traffic to the site. If implemented in a way that encouraged users to create profiles on our site, this could create a great deal of stickiness. In other words, we could be *the* site on the internet for breakdance instruction. We could then build the empire from there. The downside to this is that advertising may be hard to come by, and we may go into the pattern of losing money for the foreseeable future in the hopes of making it back later, due to our being *the* breakdance site on the internet.

For the paid approaches, they each have their benefits. Discounting the whole package, where we would give access to all of the subjects for $30 or so, could really come across as a huge bargain and could potentially create a volume greater than separating the subjects and charging $30 for each of them. This is hard to know, but I tend to think that it is a better strategy in this internet age. Charging a monthly fee has the upside of not requiring any advertising and of locking in users in a way that they get used to paying for us, and we end up receving money from them each month. The upside of this is also that we can encourage referrals by discounting the price for those who are strong referrers. The downside of course is that many people will simply walk on by, due to the fact that they are used to getting something for nothing on the internet.

I think the dilemma we face is the dilemma of the e-entrepreneur circa 2006. To charge or not to charge. Our situation is slightly different though, considering the content is something that people really are used to paying for. It might be foolish to not cash in on this existing perception, or it might be short-sighted to cash in, rather than give now and reap huge ad revenue later.

At this point, I don’t have any answers and would love to receive any sort of feedback (just getting used to writing like this has any sort of audience lol!). In any case, it is quite possible that the decision may be made for me, if it begins to become standard that ads are placed in front of videos.

I certainly forgot to mention another upside of the ad revenue approach. The demographic that a site focused on breakdancing instructionals would appeal to–namely, young males who tend to be fashion-forward trendsetters–is probably the most coveted demographic for advertisers like Red Bull, Nike, and Apple. This is not to be underestimated. On the other hand, maybe it would be nice to be untainted by a perception of having “sold out” to the advertisers. It is possible though that on the internet, a company like Nike could advertise with a site that actively questions Nike’s business practices (like sweatshops) simply because they think the demographics the site reaches are important.

It’s a strange new world, that much is for sure.

[edit: 5 minutes later. A new idea already came to me. We could show the entire site to unsubscribed users, with 10-15 second truncated clips of everything you would see (hosted on google video to save on hosting) as a member. Some of the clips would be full, and it would certainly be enough to see what you are missing, but annoying enough that it would make you say "damn it, I'll pay the money already." I like this idea, but I said that about all the others 5 minutes ago lol!]

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After visiting the tirumvir3 website, which is a clothing label sponsoring some close friends of mine, I have realized that 1) they make incredibly dope and unique clothing and 2) I want to work with them.

They come across as incredibly down-to-earth and real and my kind of people. I got this *all* from just going to their website. From this, I learn that it is going to be important to create a site that really shows who Elastic Illusion is—what we’re all about.

I think that merchandising, especially if the merchandise is good, could become a huge source of Elastic Illusion revenue and I feel like developing a relationship with an up-and-coming label like triumvir3 will be a really positive move.

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From E-Myth page 121:

Innovation “is the skill developed within your business and your people that is constantly asking, ‘What is the best way to do this?’ knowing, even as the question is asked, that we will never discover the best way, but by asking we will assuredly discover a way that’s better than the one we know now.

“In that regard, I think of innovation as the ‘Best Way’ skill. It produces a high level of energy in every company within which it’s nurtured, fed, and stimulated, energy that in turn feeds everyone the company touches–its employees, customers, suppliers, and lenders. In an innovative company everyone grows.

“There’s no doubt about it: Innovation is the signature of a bold, imaginative hand.

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“At its best, your business is something apart from you, rather than a part of you, with its own rules and its own purposes. An organism, you might say, that will live or die according to how well it performs its sole function: to find and keep customers.”

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From the moment I stumbled upon Chris Anderson’s longtail.com blog, I knew I had found a gem. The theory just struck me as so right on a basic level and fit in so well everything I had read five years prior from sources like Ray Kurzweil and the unabomber himself, Ted Kaczynski, about where the world was headed.

Now, a little bit about me. I am a breakdancer from the right side of the tracks. I have traveled around the world trying my best to learn from the best dancers and soak in as much of the culture as I could. Along the way, I always wondered why this dance wasn’t more popular. Everywhere I go people stop dead in their tracks when my friends and I start dancing. In particular, the kids beg their parents to stop and almost immediately begin trying to mimic the movement.

As I see it, the demographics of breakdancing are similar to those of skateboarding. Rebellious creative teenagers get an outlet that allows them to express themselves, be cool, and perhaps most importantly, attract members of the opposite sex.

But breakdancing is INCREDIBLY niche. In the style I do, popping, there are certainly less than 10,000 active dancers in the United States, and this is a hugely liberal estimate. How can this be? Basically, there is nowhere to learn–or to use Anderson’s metaphor, the island is underwater.

Like in Anderson’s Bollywood example, where there are 2 million Indian-Americans too widely distributed geographically to have films they would love and support released in theatres, there has been no central way for people to learn how to breakdance. Movies like the terrible-yet-successful U Got Served and the runaway television hit So You Think You Can Dance show that the market to learn is most certainly there, but no one has managed to come through on the supply side.

Cheesy videos like Darrin’s Dance Grooves, which almost no one including professionals could learn very much from, manage to sell 4.5 million copies because there are simply *no other sources.*

Enter the Internet: Let the Long Tail Begin

Ahhhhhhh 2006. I think that this is quite likely in the minds of many visionaries to be remembered as the year of the long tail. The year when youtube woke everyone up from a collective slumber. When the sleeping giant woke-the-f-up and said, wow, *I* can do it too!

And so we return to breakdancing. Now we have the means to attract all these disparate hope-to-bes through the simple yet effective filter of google search to sites where they, yes they, can learn how to breakdance, through flash video, through text, through online classes, through DVDs. A repository, Amazon-style, of all things breakdancing. With almost 0 distribution costs, with a demographic who is so tapped in that e-mail is so 2002 (think myspace), and with a product that is so incredibly viral–”hey dude! check THIS out”–that it almost runs itself, the long tail of breakdancing may well prove to be quite large indeed.

On top of this, something that Anderson has recently begun to discuss, global long tails, where what is niche in one market is mainstream in another, already applies to breakdancing. In Europe, in South America, and especially in Asia, breakdancing is nearly mainstream already and like the hip-hop movement that spawned it, breakdancing may prove to be one of the first truly global movements we see. On top of this, fans in other countries are so accustomed to listening to American music, watching American television, and learning English in school, that the language barrier begins to crumble. As the children around who are now 7 and learning English almost as intensively as their native language turn 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 by 2011, we have a foundation for a global movement that is to a large extent unaffected by language and cultural barriers, being that the performance, learning, and appreciation doesn’t require that much language in the first place.

The hit is dead (relatively). Long live the niche! And c’mon over to learn2breakdance.com. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO…

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I started “studying” sexuality, in the formal, academic sense of the word, about a year ago now. One of the first books I read was Carol Queen’s wonderful Exhibitionism For the Shy. In this wonderful book which I really should read again, I was introduced to the name Wilhelm Reich. Seven crazy coincidences and lots of googling later, I realized that this Reich fellow was probably the most interesting person I had ever had the pleasure of reading about.

A student of Sigmun Freud, the original cokehead himself, Reich eventually split with his teacher and began extensive study of the orgasm. This led him in two directions–the first, into the discovery of an energy permeating the universe that he called “orgone”. The second was the theory of body armor as a defense mechanism. Reich started conducting psychotherapy sessions with clients in their underwear so that he could more easily notice what postures they held or how they squirmed as certain feelings were uncovered (or blocked).

Now, me, I am a dancer. All I ever wanted was just to be more flexible. It was really as simple as that. “Why are my hamstrings so tight?” I wondered. “Why can’t I do the splits?” As we all know (or are soon to know), there is no tendon connecting the legs to one another. If you can lift your leg to 90 degrees (which most of you reading this can), then theoretically you can do the splits. So why can’t you?? Fear.

So this Reich stuff was revelatory for me. Body armor. That sounds like the kind of thing that would keep one inflexible. And in my lighter and more focused moments of stretching, I did feel a certain block that seemed to be literally locked into place, as though releasing it would leave me, on a deeper level, naked.

So fast forward a year. I put healing as the number one priority in my personal life and Barbara Brennan’s Hands of Light magically appears. This book not only brings Reich back up but expands on his information in ways quite astonishing to me.

Basically, Brennan uncovers not only that there is in fact body armor, but more specifically uncovers the specific types of armor as well as their location.

Now, at this point, if you don’t believe in energy or auras or chakras, just point your browser to some of my dance clips and eat that blue pill sitting on the table. Otherwise, let’s devle further.

So Brennan explains the seven basic chakras and the seven basic layers of the aura. The body armor we wear is literally real, in the same way that your shirt is real on the physical plane, on one of these auric levels and moreover, the body armor affects the functioning of the chakras in highly predictable ways. For instance, if you wear body armor on your pelvis (which many of you do by the way), you are covering up your sexuality and your connection to the Earth and sense of being grounded. This in turn shuts off energy to the second chakra

which can really be seen as nothing more than an energy gate.

In a fully functioning human being, the orgone postulated by Reich and renamed the Universal Energy Field by Brennan passes into your own energy field through the chakras. If for some reason you block this energy, whether it be out of fear or due to trauma in this life or another, the energy literally begins to clog like so many arteries. This leads to a far lower level of functioning than is natural and ultimately can lead to physical disease.

The reason is that this physical plane is nothing more than a holographic projection of another plane made of nothing but energy (if you think I’m crazy, read some string theory or even just quantum physics). If there is blocking or gripping or disfiguration on this energetic plane, this will be projected and show up on the physical plane that we are more familiar with.

So now to jump back to me. A couple nights ago, I was lying in bed, trying to feel more and more clearly my chakras and to see their level of functioning. In addition, I was trying to feel each of the auric fields and determine where my body armor was held. As I went deeper and deeper into this scanning, I felt the layers of my auric field separate and clearly saw the body armor on one of the layers. My abilities are not refined enough yet to see which layer or to fully release the armor once and for all, but this experience was enough for me to realize that this “inflexibility” is not a PART of me. It is an energy field that, if released/dispersed, will lead to large and immediate gains in my physical flexibility.

Basically I am trying to show that ultimately, physical inflexibility is not “normal” or “natural” but is the direct result of energetic constrictions which appear on the physical plane as “tightness.” We can thus use the functioning of the physical plane as a means to determine the state of the energetic plane and thus aid in our process of healing. This revelation is a big step in that direction and I will keep you updated as it progresses.

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