Month: December 2007

Craigslist creepiness

Uncategorized

I recently listed a “gently-used” set of Ikea shelves on Craigslist for $15. That’s fifteen dollars. Here’s a response I got to my post from “Eury”:

hi i am very interested in this book shelf i want to give it as a Christmas present to my girl friend . how ever i don’t have the 51 dollars your asking but i can trade u some things for it ..it would mean a lot to me if u would consider my offer..

i could trade u 2 DVD players plus some jordan sneakers and a georgio armani leather jacket which was actually kinda very expensive and only worn 3 times because it fits me kinda large but i am only 5 feet and 5 inches tall so its not hard to understand why

please call me to the following number and let me know if u are interested asap or email me back..thank you

Weirdly enough, i didn’t take Eury up on his offer. Did I err?

Christian Rock illo process

Illustration

I just did a new illustration (for the San Antonio Current) and thought it would be fun to show the process. The illo was for a story about how dull the “Christian Contemporary Music” scene is. The art director had a concept in mind when he called, so this was one of those gigs deadredfred first told me about, where your job as an illustrator is basically to “do something nice that can hang over the couch.” But that’s cool; I didn’t have the energy for a great new concept.

Anyway, the a.d’s idea was to show Jesus in a band T-shirt, rocking out to music in a crowd of polite, conservatively dressed Christian concert-goers. The a.d. had worked with me before, so he didn’t need to see sketches or even pencils; he said I could go straight to final.

Even so, for my own piece of mind, I worked up a tiny thumbnail, just to get the basic layout for the dimensions of the piece:

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TOP TEN MOVIES of… 1991?

Geek, Review

I just found this in some old computer files, so in homage to the de riguer tradition of year-end top ten lists, here are my…

TEN BEST FILMS OF 1991! (compiled in 1991, when I was 24 years old)

Barton Fink (dir. by Joel Coen)
Cape Fear (dir. by Martin Scorsese)
Cyrano de Bergerac (dir. by Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
Dead Again (dir. by Kenneth Branagh)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (dir. by Nicholas Meyer)
The Silence of the Lambs (dir. by Jonathan Demme)
The Double Life of Veronique (dir. by Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Thelma and Louise (dir. by Ridley Scott)
Truly, Madly, Deeply (dir. by Anthony Minghella)

I fancied myself a bit of a film critic back then, and even published a couple of reviews in the lefty weekly In These Times. All the same, my tastes were fairly unsophisticated  (as they still are now!), tending toward the mainstream.

Some of these films I hardly remember anymore, not having seen them in 16 years. But some – Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise, for example — are considered modern classics. At least one film, Barton Fink, has not in my mind stood the test of time. I’m a big Coen Bros. fan, but that particular film doesn’t do for me what it did back then. (To give Sari her props, she hated it at the time!) And as a kid who grew up during the Cold War, I still love Star Trek VI, with its un-subtle allusion to Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And, just to be fair, here are what I considered the…

TEN WORST FILMS OF 1991!
Blowback (dir. by Marc Levin)
Defending Your Life (dir. by Albert Brooks)
Delusion (dir. by Carl Colpaert)
The Doors (dir. by Oliver Stone)
Eating (dir. by Henry Jaglom)
The Fisher King (dir. by Terry Gilliam)
Green Card (dir. by Peter Weir)
Jungle Fever (dir. by Spike Lee)
The Last Boy Scout (dir. by Tony Scott)
Regarding Henry (dir. by Mike Nichols)

What’s notable about this list is how many bad films there are by good directors. Oliver Stone, Terry Gilliam, Peter Weir, Spike Lee, Mike Nichols — they’ve all directed many great films. But none of these are them! (And Tony Scott deserves mention just because his brother made the top ten list for that year, while he made the bottom ten.)

Elfing Oneself

Uncategorized

Thanks to OfficeMax, I “elfed” my little family. My mom chastised me for doing it without Phoebe’s “permission”. My ex-step-mom Elynn was disturbed by so much shimmying. And my friend Tori identified just what it is that makes it so creepy: “Frozen expressions on dancing bodies.” (All blame should go to wjcohen, who turned me on to the site in the first place.) Anyway, you be the judge: http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1391444500.

P.S. You can also Scrooge Yourself.

TONIGHT: Comic Book Legal Defense Fund-raiser

Comics, Publicity

Tonight, come celebrate comics and the First Amendment, while reveling alongside an all-star line up of creators! The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund‘s NYC Holiday Member party, co-hosted by JahFurry, begins promptly at 7pm and continues until 11pm, with plenty of fun in between, including a live comics jam, raffles and door prizes, live jazz-funk by Avi Bortnick, delicious vittles, and more comics stars than you can shake a sketchbook at. Location: Village Pourhouse, 64 3rd Ave @ 11th St., New York City.

As Douglas Rushkoff puts it so well, “These are tough times for the Bill of Rights, and comics are just one of many canaries in the mine shaft. But they are a great litmus test for free speech, a highly accessible and fertile forum for ideas that simply can’t be disseminated through other mainstream media, and—perhaps most importantly—a way to share important concepts and ways of thinking with young people…. Join [us] as we celebrate and support freedom of expression in the original bottom-up mass medium….”

Confirmed guest creators include: Kyle Baker, Paul Pope, Moby, Alex Maleev, Douglas Rushkoff, John Lucas, Rick Spears, man_size, 4-eyez, bertozzi, zegas, mollycrabapple, heartshapedkey, dangoldman, Anthony Lappé, Andy MacDonald, Arvid Nelson, jentong, bobo_dreams, hottenecolden, Alec Longstreth, incogvito, new_universe, and Paul Azaceta.

I’m donating a grab-bag of signed 4-eyez goodies, including the brand-new CD of The Civilians’ Gone Missing soundtrack, which includes a comix adaptation of one of the monologues from the show; the new PBS Nature comic; A Few Perfect Hours; The Vagabonds #1 and #2; Titans of Finance; and Katrina Came Calling.

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George Corbett out of my life

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Today I packed up all of George Corbett’s papers (including the developed photos) and sent them off to FOUND Magazine. I never heard back from him or his wife about claiming the stuff, and I was sick of having it around my apartment. So maybe the good folks at FOUND will find some use for it. (By the way, if you’re wondering who the hell I’m talking about, click on the link to “George Corbett” in my user tags, and you’ll be able to read all my previous posts about the stuff.)