Happy Birthday Olivia!

Every year we have a big ol' birthday blast for our kids. It started when we threw the first for daughter Olivia. It helped that it was in the summer, usually super hot, and that we really like to have big ol' throwdowns where we feed and liquidate people. We get really geeky and theme it and theme all the food and send 'em home stuffed and happy and with a a soundtrack of the day: also themed. The first two were surf/hawaiian/jungle themed as we were throwin down Luau style, but it you read the title to this mix, you can see where her current interests lie. Which, you know, Daddy likes the whole my-daughter-loves-herself-some-rock-n-roll thing!

I get to be another of my selves for this and be DJ/mixmaster as I love me some Mixtapes since I been being about 12! I admit to a bit of sheepish gloating: I consider myself somewhat of a hipster, but since I live in a decidedly non-hipster town, I get all my stuff from second hand sources (which is why I love me some interenetting), but I've been putting the Beatles' "Octopus's Garden" on various mixes for friends' kids for a couple of years now and recently I read an article about hipsters having kids and trying to pass on what they think is cool to their cool kids in the hopes that being surrounded by inspiring cool stuff will help their kid be thoughtful and smart and inspired, as well as cool, and that song is considered a staple of hipster mixes. So that means I'm either ahead of the curve or not all that original as I thought. I'm leaning towards the latter.

Happy Birthday!

A painted card for my sister's birthday. It's today, this beautiful first day of summer. It's sunny, not too hot and I'm on vacation, so in all the ways it's good.

My sister...

She's growing up and we're different but she's lovely and smart and a determined sort of person of whom I am immensely proud.

She and her gorgeous daughter take life as an adventure and a carving a nice place for themselves in it.

Happy Birthday!

a present for a friend: an ode to a band

This is actually a drawing from last summer. It was drawn for a friend's wedding, so I don't actually have this drawing anymore, but I scanned it before I sent it out.

It was all about mood and angst and fore lorn wet October love in the young. It was me revisiting a time, too, that was special as a young me and a young my wife were falling hard with this as a soundtrack.

a figthin' pothead

My friend and fellow comic geek, all around imagination lover and good dude Tim Baron called the other night and challenged me to come up with a an entry or a "fighter" to tag team with one of his for Sam Hiti's Fist-a-Cuffs blog. This is what I came up with. It's kind of last minute but I still like it. I've always had a thing for the whole Evil-Genius-Head-in-a-Mechanized-Bubble thing. The tentacles, too. They're creepy in a cool way. Probably both obsessions are fanned by Mr. Mignola.

I drew this while "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!" played on Encore. It struck me as to what I really miss in movies coming out nowadays: texture. In "Honey" there is so much great stuff to look at, some gooey, hairy, grimy, muddy, ridged, slimy, slippery, three dumensioanl, real texture to look at I feel it sucks you in to the movie. Modern movies with all it' s CGI tricks give some pretty tasty visual treats, but there's so much less life. Life comes when you give us something to chew on, give us something visceral. Too much CGI becomes flat, and and, at worst, grainy and unfocused and just too much of nothing in which for us to become truly invested.

Now, I love me some big movie special effects and the comic geek in me loves to see Spidey all flipping and swingy and I watch the special editions of Lord of the Rings almost regularly and adoringly, but I'm c'mon, man, gimme something to chew on! A student asked me if I was psyched to see TMNT and I gotta say and said: NO. Not really. I saw the first one on the big screen and I'd rather see those little Asian dudes in rubber costumes jumping around if it means seeing actual light on actual bodies and surfaces creating all that gorgeuos textured eye candy. If it means that there are better camera compositions and better lighting that I sacrifice a few feet in how high hero jumps, so be it. I'm hoping the trend in digital goes away from all digitial and a towards a better blend of the real and digital. I just want some texture back.

cute and innocent

My daughter and my Boston, ostensibly. If you have 3 1/2 year olds, you've witnessed the manic sugar high. And if you have a Boston you've seen this, too.

films and favors

Do yourself a favor and watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGLv3IEL0VI . It goes down smooth with Pabst Blue Ribbon in a dirt ass bar.

Do yourself a favor and read this blog: www.rockinsider.com. She posts some cool stuff to listen to and gots good choice in music, yo.

Another favor to me would be to read and look at this kid's stuff: www.myspace.com/stretchsquire. A former student, a friend, and working on some kinda heap 'a talent.

I'll post more of my stuff, cuz I know all one of you is chomping at the bit.

soundtrack:
silence. (running air conditioner, burning cd, dog walking back and forth, baby breathing deep over monitor, own breath) silence.

just to watch them pop

Where the last drawing was more of an indie-rock, fall song: moody, delicate and noisy at the same time - - like Death Cab, this is a Norah Jones tune. Something from "Feels Like Home". A lazy summer day, hot, airy, hazy. A picnic table and the sound of steel guitar and cicadas.

a lie in the fall

Inside cover and front page of a new sketchbook. Images, ideas that need to be drawings, but don't fit into my longer work and that are sketches more than big works. Kinda like demos for two and half minute singles.

soundtrack:
"morning in the moonlgiht" - saves the day

three reasons for being a consumer pt. 1

I have to admit, I do have some tunes I didn't pay for, but I will honestly say I do not use file sharing programs. Somebody I know personally or myself, mostly myself, have bought everything I listen to. The digital revolution will eventually change the business of music and it WILL be for the better, but for now there are some sounds from some bands I will always happily pay for, because I want them to continue making the noise to which I like to listen. So I present three reasons here for consumerism that I feel deserves support.

1 - Neil Young "Living With War"
Check it out while it's streaming on his website, then buy the album. I've already posted about this and, yes, I need to again. The best of American protest songs just got some new cohorts. Young's album is an anti-war rant that is fuzzy, funny, armed, smart and dangerous in all the right ways. A mostly, mid-tempo fuzz-fest of guitar and slogans, there are no open throttle racers, but there are some rollicking gems that invite you to sing along. And some drop into rawkus, noisy, foot-stoppers that just plead to be played with the knob twisted all the way to the right.

Young's defiantly and clearly anti-Bush, but really only anti-Bush because he is so anti-war. Young lends his voice to those that seem to continually be left behind by political parties these days: those working middle of the road blues. Collars, not bloods. People trying to get by and getting caught in the cross fire of rhetoric and killed in the streets of countries who were invaded for the oil, sold on the ideals of Bushland the Ride. Young has been trying his damnedest to be truthful for longer than I've been alive and you can feel him seething at "faulty information" being fed to us by our leaders. Watching the new "trickle down", only this time its blame and cover-up instead of money.

All this aside it is what good, rowdy rock-n-roll should. Pure, stripped down, heartfelt, fuzzy, raw, honest and trying in it's own way to truly change the world.

You gotta love a song called "Let's Impeach the President" and the person who has the cojones to write it.

soundtrack:
not Neil, actually, but my wife playing harp in the dining room

in this case, the revolution may not be broadcast at all

I have a dream that one day we will all be employees and consumers of the same global company. And frankly, it scares the shit out of me.

From MoveOn.org:
Big Internet operators like AT&T and Verizon want the power to decide which Web sites open properly on our computers—giving them control over what we do and where we search online. So far, Congress has caved to their demands.

But because of intense public pressure, some members of Congress are starting to switch from AT&T's side to ours! In just a week, Congress saw over 250,000 of us sign a petition demanding the Internet stay free. Joining this call are tech pioneers like Google and Microsoft, diverse groups ranging from MoveOn to Gun Owners of America, and even some celebrities.

If enough of us stand up now, there's still time for the House of Representatives to do the right thing next week when it votes on whether to protect or destroy Network Neutrality—the Internet's First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom.

Can you join our petition asking Congress to protect the free and open Internet?

http://civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/?id=7450-6668143-chpmS5z6Sv7zvaa9th0zgg&t=2

This petition will be delivered to your members of Congress, and everyone who signs will be kept informed of the next steps we can take to keep the pressure on Congress this week.

Companies like AT&T are spending millions lobbying Congress to gut Net Neutrality. A House committee voted to go along with AT&T's scheme last week, but we are fighting back hard before next week's full House vote. We want to raise public awareness of this issue and hand Congress 350,000 signatures.

To reach this goal, we're launching a contest: Ask your friends to sign the petition and you can win one of 10 iPod Nanos or one of 40 BarnesandNoble.com gift certificates. Start by signing the petition yourself, and you'll receive instructions to enter the contest.

Snopes.com, which monitors various causes that circulate on the Internet, recently explained this issue:

Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site's traffic has precedence over any other's...Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend's MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user's web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane.

If companies like AT&T have their way, Web sites ranging from Google to eBay to MoveOn either pay the equivalent of protection money to get into the "fast lane" or risk opening slowly on your computer. We can't allow the Internet—this incredible medium which has been such a revolutionary force for democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech—to become captive to large corporations.