Dogs!

"Yeh like d'ags?"

Happy Wall

Here's some progress from a new project at school.
We've got these cold gray walls all over so we tried to bring some bright cheerful energy into the mix. I hope we can continue it...I can see some twisting tree roots and floating leafs all over the ceiling and pipes and continuing on down the adjacent walls. Should be cool!
You can see more photos here.

The Grizzly Bear Chair

For my first post of the decade I'd just like to take a moment and marvel at the majesty. I guess I would never stand if I owned this thing. I would get someone to install wheels in it, and just live the life of luxury.
Let the record reflect. My New Year's Wish has been made.

You Are Here

My work was recently part of an exhibition called 'You Are Here." It was organized by Whitespace. Over 80 artists and designers contributed. It was very fun. You can see the works here. Mine is B15 and Haruka's is C9.

Lost Season 5

Last year Haruka and I watched the first episode of the first season. We were like, "Let's see what all the fuss is about." And then, because of the internet, we thought, "Well let's just watch a couple more." A few hours later we were in the store slobbering over the first four seasons. Gimme. Gimme. But I remember thinking, 'We'll just watch the first season and then forget about it." Of course once you get to the last episode of that season you realize it's one of the biggest cliff hangers in tv history. You have to keep watching. So then, God help us, we were hooked. After we got to the end of the 4th season we knew we'd have to wait awhile till they released Season 5. Well, it's been about a year now and we're picking it up again. Addicted doesn't even begin to describe it. We're sick and we need help. I would write more but we still have to watch 2 more episodes. And then about 16 making-of documentaries. I hope we can remember to eat and go to the bathroom while this is going on.

Watching...Listening...Reading

Watching:

Listening:

Reading:


and by the way-- this is awesome:

This is Orson Welles

I've been a fan of Welles for a long time now. Although my favorite director of all time may be Billy Wilder, I still love a good Orson Welles movie. This book (This is Orson Welles) is an exhaustive Q & A between him and Peter Bogdonavich. It's really funny and insightful and is full of all of these bizarre little stories. It's also full of strange statements I don't fully understand, that I like to quote randomly in my loudest voice: "Comedy is life in a long shot. Tragedy is life in a close up." Stuff like that.
I'm going to do a few illustrations inspired by passages in the book and post them up here every once in awhile. And smoke a cigar as I post them.

Batman Annual 1990

so i got bored with that 'n' thing. meh. this comic just slipped out of a mess of of books. i must have thrown it into my bag when i was back home last summer. ah, what a goodie. probably my favorite 'two-face' cover ever. and the sprouse art is awesome. not to mention it has a great story.
this seems to be the week for comics from 1990.
my version of 'wolverine: the jungle adventure' is up over at Robert Goodin's awesome Covered site. ah, memories.

Stephen King's "N"

I'm intrigued. I'm gonna start reading/watching these.

The Marquis

I picked this up a couple weeks ago. It was weird. I started to read it. It's like a 300 page graphic novel, and usually you can read one of those within a few hours. But one of those things, I was only able to read a few pages here and there. It was a slow burn. I fell asleep quite a few times trying to read it before bed. And about a third of the way into it I was feeling- ah, so so. Nothing special. I don't know why it has all these worshipping reviews. But then, I don't know. It started to grow on me. Pretty soon I realized I had been reading this thing for over 2 weeks. So one day, I sat down and said, "I am going to finish this bastard today." And so then I did and WOW.
The shining lights in my comic book history goes like this:
The Dark Knight Returns pretty much kicked the doors down for me.
The first 4 graphic novels of the TMNT also fired me up.
The frantic energy of Kyle Baker's DIck Tracy books did it too.
Then it was Mcfarlane's work on early Spawn- which got me obsessed with lines.
Then Sin City came out, and that was about the only comics I read for years.
With a Hellboy here and there...
Then I picked up the first '100 Bullets' collection on a whim and fell completely in love with that series- up until about the 8th book when I think it started to get TOO gritty and there were no more characters to love. I may have to go back and finish it.
With the exception of The Dungeon series and everything Lewis Trondheim does, I'd say for the last 6 or 7 years I've just been buying books based on the art. So I own a lot of awesome looking stuff- but not too much with totally gripping stories...
Now there's Marquis, and I feel a re-awakening. It manages to remind you of dozens of different things you've read before, but somehow manages to be completely fresh and different from all of them.
I can't reccommend this enough.
Plus, it's dang creepy.
Ordinarily people in comics draw monsters that you just want to keep looking at. I mean, if you saw a comic book monster in real life, you would just stand there and admire it. Davis' monsters are really disturbing and twisted. You don't want to linger on them. They make you a little nauseous.
This book is amazing.