dead old blog

The show was fun!
.

I'm going to LA tonight to see Jean Jacques Perrey again.

Riding with Otis and Astrid. Whee!

This is one of my favorite times of the year, when the city quites down a bit and bunch of people I don't know (that take up a lot of space) leave and go to the dessert. Shorter lines for coffee and restaraunts for a week! I love it.

Man, I can't wait to see Jean Jacques Perrey tonight, like I mentioned here.

JJP is one of my biggest inspirations in the electronic music I make (although I don't know if you could tell that by listening to it) and I never really thought I'd get the chance to see him.

In cased you missed it below, here is a picture of Beefy, Jean Jacques, and myself:

Many years ago I had the idea of doing a comic strip based around the lives of loser super heroes. The concept eventually evolved into my SupterTop Comics (comic), but I still wanted to share one of them with ya'll. To be honest, the rest of the ones I did totally sucked, but I wouldn't mind trying to do these again for a weekly newspaper.

Labels: comics

Last week my friend Karen told me she was considering naming her child Velouria, after the Pixies song. I suggested a couple of other Pixie’s titles… No. 13 Baby, Nimrod's Son, and Gigantic were instantly shot down, however she did give Cecilia Ann and Doolittle where at least considered before she rejected them.

The Penny Arcade Expo is happening right now up in Washington. Sounds like crazy fun, hella game cabinets set for coin free operation. It's like the World Yo-yo Contest of nerds and gamers. Actually I guess it's more like the National Yo-Yo Contest 'cause I'd want to go to PAX. I'm constantly checking the nerdcore boards and pretending I'm up there now.

Not so much for the games, although I could spend plenty of time in front of Discs Of Tron if they have it, but my main interest would be the nerdcore hip hop stuff. There are two nerdcore documentaries in production right now, and they have both let me know that they are going to be there. PAX has always been good to the nerdcore scene, but this year it seems to have fully embraced it. Of course Frontalot will be doing the big show again this year and so will mc chris, but the cool part is the Sunday night show post pax. Damn I wish I could see my friend Beefy's set, I bet he's gonna tear shit up.

Sure I wanna hang out with the documentary crews and meet all the cats from the Rhymetorrents board, but mostly I really wanna play Discs of Tron.. I mean, catch the sunday night nerdcore hip hop show.

edit: okay, I'm not as jealous anymore...

On a recent visit to a Blockbuster video store I noticed a slew of knock off movies adorning the New Release rentals. Knock offs are bad by nature, and there certainly is no fault to Blockbuster for trying to make a buck by carrying them, however, the shear number of copies they had was pretty overwhelming. They often even had more copies of the knock offs than the films they where knocking off. For example, there was a wall of Pirates of Treasure Island dvds.

Just look at PoTI and PoTC side by side and tell me this film is supposed to stand on it own.

Underneath PoTI was a tits and ass version knock off simply called Pirate. I would assume it's rated "Arrr!".

Against the opposite wall of new releases was the DaVinci Treasure. “An anthropologist must unlock the code hidden in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci in order to find the greatest treasure ever, one that could change Christianity forever. “ However obvious a Da Vinci Code rip off this may be it’s probably still better than the Ron Howard version. BTW, I like the Amazon.com info on this movie: “Budget Estimate: $0 Million”, that would probably serve as a decent plot summary as well.

But the Darwin award goes to Snakes On A Train, for being the timeliest bad-movie-knock-off on the shelves. Of all the knock offs listed, I can at least say that Snakes On a motherfucking Train has the most original sounding spin on the movies mentioned. “Under a powerful Mayan curse, snakes are hatched inside a young woman, slowly devouring her from within. Her only chance for survival is a powerful shaman who lives across the border. With only hours to live, she jumps on a train headed for Los Angeles. Unfortunately for the passengers aboard, they are now trapped, soon to be victims of these flesh-eating vipers.”

Really, I’ve had it with all these motherfuckin’ imitations of motherfuckin’ average films, where’s the You, Me, and Everyone We Know rip off?

I'm just curious what some of ya'lls favorite Ghost Ride clips are.. here are some good ones.

Josh over at B3 studios is giving away my couch. I left the couch with Josh when I left my kickass downtown minneapolis apartment many years ago.



Seeing this picture brings back fond memories of all the girls that I didn't make out with, and all the time I didn't spend cleaning up semen stains from it's stripped comfortable exterior.

There had been a few posts up on makezine regarding bleach effects on shirts. It all sort of reminded me of some of the stuff I used to do while dying yo-yo halves, so I decided to try to mix the ideas together.

The basic idea of the bleach work is to take a mister (spray bottle, whatever) and put bleach in it. Then cut up a stencil, put it on a shirt, and evenly mist the stenciled area with bleach. Now, the basic idea of my yo-yo dying was to take an object and apply either a soft mask or a hard mask on it before dying it. A soft mask, such as dish soap, will give you a cool marble effect. Where a hard mask, such as Elmer’s glue or a sticker or whatever, will give you a distinct non-affected area.

So in terms of shirts I tried a bunch of different experiments using my Hand Of Yo logo. In the first attempt, I took a blank blue shirt and randomly squirted some dish soap on it before spray bleaching the shirt.

On the second project I silk-screened my logo on a red shirt, then traced the logo with dish soap, sprayed bleach, added another layer of soap tracing the screened image again, then added another layer of bleach misting.

On both shirts I had cut out a large square template to keep the bleach from getting on the rest of the shirt, and I let the bleach sit for about 10 minutes before washing the shirt in the washing machine.

After washing the blue shirt, I screened my logo on, and then followed that print with machine embroidering a thick line.

The red shirt already had the print (although it was a little faded), so after washing I just embroidered it (but don’t have a pic of it with embroidery). You can see on the red shirt the different bleach effects from the first misting and the second. Kind of cool.

Not happy with the square template I used, next time I’ll just use some tape as a mask.

Here is one more shirt I embroidered without bleach effect (‘cause its white) and just for the hell of it a sweater (at top) that I just embroidered, once again following a silk-screened image.

related: I'll be selling some of my goods (including some of these shirts) at a trunk show this weekend.

Funk N' Trunk Burning Man Playa special.

Levende Lounge: 1710 mission at duboce, san francisco

Sunday Aug 20th 4-7PM

No cover, full bar. $3 beer and great bloody marys.

dj seven spinning funky beats

Please bring checks/cash for designers.

A bunch of us cartoonists got together for a farewell brunch for Tanya this sunday.

In her honor we did a bunch of pirate themed exquisite corpses, here is one of them.

Keep in mind that no artist got to see the entire picture, they only could see their part of the sketch.

For most of you who may be familiar with corpses, our group is doing something kind of different. We fold the paper in thirds, but each artist only does a pencil sketch then passes it on. After the page is finished a fourth person then inks the whole piece to give it a coherent look and working magic on the sometimes weird results of the unfolded pages.

Here is a bit of a recap for the week

Wednesday I went down south to the Electronic Arts Campus in Redwood Shores to eat lunch with my buddy Nick. I got there an hour early and went straight to the free arcades. After half an hour of Tekken 3, I started practicing the game cross armed (right hand on the joystick). I ate lunch with Nick, we talked yo-yos then I went back to play all the free games I could. I love the EA campus.

Thursday evening was Cartoonist Conspiracy, with lots of new folks, and finished a new comic. We are getting ready for the San Francisco Zine Fest, hopefully we’ll have 3 or 4 new titles to sell at the table. Oh, speaking of the Cartoonist Conspiracy, one of our comics is online as a .pdf, you can read it here.

Friday was awesome, John (highlyliquid.com) is in town from Ohio so we got together at Robert’s (from Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa) house for a circuit bending and recording session. I got a short vid of us messing around here. The next step is to take the recordings and chop them up into songs. I have a copy and I’m gonna mail it to John and we’ll see what we come up with separately I guess. I put a video up of us tweaking.

On Saturday I found a Roland JX-P keyboard and a Yamaha TX7 sound module at a yard sale on 20th and Valencia for $15 bucks.

Sunday we had a Cartoonist brunch and in honor of our friend Tanya who is moving back to Edinburgh for a while. In her honor we did a series of pirate themed exquisite corpses that turned out (mostly) great. Afterwards, I went to a burning man trunk show where I had some clothes for sale.

Since then Robert asked if I’d be into playing toys and guitar and stuff with KLS. That’s sort of the best part of the week. I started playing in bands when I was 15 and started promoting punk shows when I was 16. I continued playing live shows up until I moved to St. Louis. I pretty much ain’t rocked a crowd in 6 years, that totally sucks. I’m really into the idea of making noise and sounds for somebody else’s band, and having somebody make weird noises for mine. I guess like when I was playing music with God Damn Midget. I would handle the pop stuff and song structure while Matt brought the weirdness on some songs, and we’d switch roles on other songs. So I guess for now I’ll try to jam with KLS a couple of times and see if it works out.

If you drive in the city often looking for parking, you’ll often see those people that stand in good parking spots and flag you in, as if you never would have found the spot without their help. So you pull into this spot and they are waving you in trying to make it look as if they are helping, and then when you park your car they ask you to pay them for saving that great spot for you and helping you park.

It’s such an annoying problem in this city that often you’ll just keep driving around instead of taking a spot that’s open, just because some asshole is gonna harass you for money and you are worried that if you don’t give him some scratch he’ll fuck with your car.

So, I found a solution, if you see a spot open, and some jerk comes around trying to be a parking attendant, roll down your window and thank them as they try to guide you in. You’ve got to act like you are all about it, and as you are backing up go a little to far and bump the car behind you. Nothing major or anything, just a little tap, but flip out. “Oh my God! My car! I thought you were helping me, why didn’t you help me?! I just got that bumper fixed too! What am I going to do?” Really play it up.

Chances are pretty good that you won’t be asked for any dough, but if so just bring up your bumper.

Anyone else got any ideas?

Sonny got a Lovelife bag! So of course I had to get the scrap from Roxanne and make as much as I could with it. This is the first Scrap Life article I've written not using that coveted green material from my bag.



I surprised Sonny with a wallet and yo-yo bag made out of the same material as his bag, including the trim. He posted pics up on his Flickr account (slideshow here). The yo-yo bag is gorgeous, and reversable! I found a black shirt at some yuppies yard sale with this cool yellow skull screened on it, I was surprised that it was basically the same size as the bag would need to be, so I bought it for a dime. The wallet I'm not so into. The material just wasn't as friendly as what I used for my wallet, but I did manage to get decent embroidery on there. Sonny loves Polaroid cameras, so the pic on the wallet is a Polaroid style picture of Sonny.

When I first got the material I wanted to make a bike cozy for Sonny's freestyle bmx bike, but decided to wait on the project. Well, last weekend Yaris did some free events and workshops in the city so I decided to go for the "bike cozy workshop". I got there and when I asked the girl how to make a cozy she showed me Timbuk2 cozy that was fully assembled and said "make it like this one". I could have done that at home, but since I had Sonny's fabric there, and they had the perfect trim, I stayed and made my first bike cozy, similar to the Timbuk2 one, but I think I figured out an easier pattern for the next one I make.

So, Sonny's got a Love Life Bag, with matching wallet, reversable yo-yo holster, and top bar bike cozy. I think that's more than I've done with my own fabric... time to get busy on project #5.

Labels: crafts, scrap life scraplife

Last week I was playing a role in The Go Game at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Of course I was doing some yo-yo character, but there was also a girl in the game playing Wonder Woman.

The game ended and I walked back towards HQ with Wonder Woman, when we noticed the park's "Lost and Found" office. I talked Wonder Woman into running inside and desperately asking if anyone had turned in a jet, because she couldn't find her's.

Wednesday night was my first earthquake. Of course it was pretty scarey. At first I thought someone was just sort of jumping on the floors nearby. That was the first four seconds, then it got much bigger. Not "shit falling off the tables" bigger, just more like these steady waves rolling through the floor.

The earthqauke was a 4.4, and was in Glen Ellen, CA, 42 miles north of where I am. I can't imagine what it felt like there.

I'm really glad to have experienced an earthquake, I was getting nervous about not having felt any in the two years I've been here... like a big one was building up.

Really I don't get what the big deal about make up sex is.

I bet it's better in front of a mirror though.

No relation to the Blue Man Group, this is just an old painting of mine.

... But... speaking of Blue Man Group... check outBlue Man Group's line of musical instruments. I haven't tried on YET, but I might just have to sell my soul to get one of each of these.. I mean, this shit is perfect for circuit bending! And the sensors could be useful.

Then again, preset songs are lame and there aren't many different sounds on the keyboard. The drum one seems cool, but optic sensors aren't super predictable when it comes to triggering.

You know, limited sounds usually means a simple to find circuit.. maybe it will be good for bending.. DAMNIT, I wanna tear one of these things apart!

Check out the videos here!