i'll be in NY this weekend (with my dad). gonna see quintron & miss pussycat at some place called Rocky's (used to be called the LOcal & a bunch of other different names from what I understand). they're playing on saturday night (16th). Anyone know of this place or where it is? All I know is that it's in Brooklyn. Any NY peeps going to be around? anyone know of anything else going on up there this weekend? i haven't had a chance to look at what's going on...
not going to make it to comicon this year (kinda lame - would have liked to go to the muppet anniversary party). if anyone's going to be there can you do me a favor and 1. say hello to jen who will be working the fantagraphics booth (and probably delerious and filled with hatred) and 2. say hello to bwana spoons and pals... are you going to be there mister cecil? luster? this would have been the 7th year in a row that I would have gone, so maybe i should give it a break for once...
participated in a "gallery talk" last sunday which was rather odd. had to sit underneath bright lights and talk about the art i have up at the DCAC. i don't usually do well in those sort of situations, but it went OK i think.
the galaxy hut in arlington is changing ownership, and the guy taking over has asked me to do an interactive mural across half of the bar in exchange for permanent gallery space on the other walls. i've been coming up with a bunch of ideas and designs. thinking of going with a penny arcade theme and building things like a digital photo booth (without a camera), a fortune teller genie, a strongman blow game, a raffle wheel with a bunch of different mixed drinks on it, wavy mirrors if i can figure out how to make them, and a mutoscope (which I'm most excited about figuring out how to build). i have to get all these ideas approved still, but i'm going to make the mutoscope regardless (planning on extracting the frames from a video and then printing them individually on index cards).
got about half of the "? heads" drawn, i'll post them when i have time to draw the other half. anyone who has a head from the last batch, but doesn't have an account set up (max, munish, ayo, dave), send a message to josh... oh yeah and julia. i think that's all of them....
anyone who ordered stuff from me over the last week or three, your order will be on its way come thursday. i lent out the button maker, and haven't been able to arrange to get it back until tomorrow. order will be there soon tho (probably with some other stuff cos i feel bad for taking so bloody long)
i plan on working on the bendependent site over the next couple weeks. gonna figure out a way to put up the whole comic journal, hoping it will inspire me to start drawing it again daily. trying to figure out php commenting and how to frankenstein other people's scripts to get them to work the way i want them to. got any links for me?
some thoughts at 5:08am on a tuesday night:
I just got paid electronically. That is nice. I like drawing comics in the middle of the night during electronic paynight. It happens at 1am (midnight Chicago time cos we get paid through Chicago). i'm kind of tired, but not as tired as i usually am right now. it helps coming into comic night with more or less of a "script" rather than pulling it out of my ass like I have for the last 10 weeks or so. It becomes more of a production job and I can concentrate on layout and facial expressions and whatnot. i have 4 playlists of mp3s saved on jason's computer and i've listened to them every single week for the last 37 weeks (guns n roses followed by neutral milk hotel followed by bobby conn followed by quintron). it's become a routine and i've gotten so that i know how late it is based on where i am in the playlist...
so now i get to drive home all delerious-eyed to sleep for a couple hours with a small fan blowing in my face in an unairconditioned room. it's gonna be totally sweet! i will probably blare the radio on the way home, and i imagine i'll fall asleep in my shoes with the lights on. or perhaps i'll fall asleep watching a movie. or maybe while listening to a playlist of mp3s. or the morning news even like i sometimes watch (it's usually one of the 3). there's not much interesting going on in the news lately though. it's kind of at a filler point.
earlier today brad and kim and i walked over to the site where crafty bastards is gonna be. it's a huge space. if there is time, i think i'm gonna try to build a large castle out of scrap wood to bring there (like a shanty castle that a homeless person would build). me and brad are splitting a 10 x 10 space this year. i'd like to make it real obnoxious and fun.
we watched peewee's big adventure the other night. it's kind of always been my favorite movie. i should make it a point to watch it every couple months. it makes me happy and gets me thinking about how i became the way that i am for some reason. and then i start looking up schwinn black phantoms and AMI continental jukeboxes and shopping for fake food and hollogram makers. and then that leads to reading about the history of amusement arcades and vending machines. and i eventually end up finding things like manatee boxers.
and that just rules.
p.s.here's an incredibly homoerotic photo of me putting the smackdown on mister josh during the july 2 party. chuck sent this to my email and i just found it today. he's got others. if anyone else is holding out on dirtfarm party pix, please post them in these here responses...
I was wondering if others have had as an absurd work environment as I do. Here is what happened yesterday.
I am a computer consultant right now stationed at a client site. There is an employee of the client who is the most obscene and gross person I have ever met. He is obsessed with serial killers, talks about “Checking out of life soon” and feels that America should set up a hierarchical caste system preferably with computer programmers (his job) and doctors at the top.
The guy walks in and outbursts “I was thinking about people who have grown up without the threat of physical violence in sheltered lives. I think I should become a Super Hero who goes around showing them what it is to live with that threat.” This statement was aimed at me because for some reason he has the impression that I have been handed everything in my life and have never had to work for anything. When I asked if he was threatening me he responded “Just stay the fuck away from Frank’s Deli and Daiquiris and Crèmes in Covington.” (His hang outs I guess)
While I was at lunch he taped my laptop shut with duck tape because he “Hates me” and that I am a “tool.”
Finally during another one of his rants he kept calling me “Finger Paint” out of disrespect for my job as a designer. I was fed up and called him out, he started screaming, and “You think you are better than me? This isn’t a direct threat only a general statement of fact, DON’T LET ME SEE YOU OUTSIDE OF THIS PLACE.”
I was not the only target of his wrath yesterday, but needless to say I quit. I will probably just be moved to another project but it is one of those anywhere but there situations.
I was watching Being Julia when the phone rang for the third time. No, I wasn't interested in taking part in a market study. The last time I said yes, I was lied to about how long it would last, I was told I had to listen to and answer every question in a long section that was not applicable to me in any way, and when I said that I had to go and didn't want to finish answering the stupid survey, I was harassed for several more minutes about the importance of completing the questionnaires. Fuck you. If your big corporation can contract out big market studies like this, they can do a better job of designing the survey, and they can give me a financial incentive or compensation for wasting 20 minutes of my precious time answering your invasive and poorly worded questions.
I conducted telephone interviews for the LSU Department of Sociology when I was a poor undergraduate student, and I have a Master's in epidemiology, so I know the importance of random sampling and fully completed questionnaires. But in contrast to corporate market studies, scientific research is blatantly honest and up-front about informed consent, and interview content and duration.
I'm happy to answer any survey for scientific or non-profit purposes. When the municipalities of Montreal were merged into one large city, the government sponsored a survey to find out about residents' satisfaction with municipal services, and I was more than happy to answer it. For free. But don't expect me to tell you how I spend my disposable income and what products I buy. Not for free, anyway. Do your own homework and stop wasting my time.
