ink doodle

Based on a Dorothea Lange photograph, Los Angeles, 1941

After Marville

A sloppy pen and ink doodle loosely based on a Charles Marville photograph.

Lazy Stadium Night

Catfish on the mound...

How to Hang A Picture on Yahoo Makers

Kelly Phillips Badal over at Yahoo Makers asked me some questions about hanging art in the home and my book, How to Hang a Picture. Follow the links to check out her informative article...

Aging in Place

When I was a sophomore in college, I got it into my head to do a fanzine. Fueled by a steady diet of pizza and ginger-ale from Captain Nemo’s Pizza in Boston’s Kenmore Square, I became giddy with thoughts of the acclaim and accolades my zine-to-be would garner. It would be like the Paris Review of hardcore zines, erudite, knowing, and fun, reflecting my teenaged years as a straight-edge posi kid but with a burgeoning art-rock maturity that I believed my soon-to-be twenty-year old self possessed in spades.

I scoured Lungfish lyrics to find a suitably cryptic name for my zine. Would it be Plague of Particles or Invisible Regime? Either way, it would kick Suburban Voice and Flipside’s respective asses to the curb. It would be the kind of zine that would get you laid.

I decided that Jawbox would be my first interview. They had a show coming up at the Middle East. I bought a tiny reporter’s tape recorder, and got some film for my junky point-and-shoot camera. I thought about all the kids taking hot shit photos at shows, Brian Maryansky, Justin Moulder, countless others, on stage, snapping away, cameras slung over their shoulders like how Gregory Peck held a Sten gun in Guns of Navarone. Sure, that could be me too. Who needs a real camera or expertise or any sense of how to take a photograph that will look good on the printed page? Not me!

It was a heck of a show. This was in February of 1993. I know I saw Drive Like Jehu at the Middle East around the same time, and Shudder To Think as well. I can’t imagine it was all at the same show, though conceivably that bill could have existed--three legendary bands at the height of their powers--in my hazy memory, all three shows exist at the same moment in time, followed the next night by Jawbreaker playing a student performance space at Northeastern, followed by Kingpin and Eye for an Eye at TT The Bears.

It was a long time ago, but I remember them playing Ones and Zeroes specifically. I vividly remember Zach Barocas’s barely contained mania on the drums, a theatrical display of virtuosity, all flailing, rubbery limbs. Kim Coletta smiling and grooving, J. Robbins and Three-Dollar Bill Barbot somehow battling their guitars and coming up victorious.
 

After the show, I steeled myself. I had snapped a few bashful photographs of the band, but found the activity to be distracting and embarrassing. I was not the machine gun wielding Gregory Peck I’d thought I was. Robbins was loading up his gear when I walked up to him.

I stuttered out that I wanted to interview him for my zine. And what happened next is why I truly and completely will always love hardcore, punk rock music, and the strange little scene I grew up in. There was a moment of honest hesitation on Robbins’ face as I asked him. Like he was thinking, “good god is there a back door I can run the fuck out of an away from this kid? Can I tell him sorry, but no, I have to be somewhere? Is there any conceivable scenario where I don’t have to get interviewed for this kid’s fanzine that will probably never come out or end up being a garbled mess of misspelled words and xeroxed cliches? Can’t I just have like five minutes of peace?” And then he sighed, stood up straight and said, “Sure. Fine, okay. Let me just get a beer. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

Poor J. Robbins. I wish I could remember all the ridiculous questions I asked him, but I can only imagine the patience it took on his part to kindly and sincerely reply to each of them. We met at a table upstairs in the bar/restaurant portion of the club. I was nineteen years old at the time, so it might very well have been an impossibility, but it continues to astound my adult self that I didn’t even try to buy him a beer. They guy was willing to take his time and talk to me, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to get him a beverage.

I told him I’d seen them a bunch of times, which was true. I was a huge fan since their first seven inch. I’d seen them at the Anthrax in Connecticut, and at UCONN with Shudder to Think. I had a gray Jawbox Grippe t-shirt that I wore to death. After a few softball questions, I prepared for my big Woodward and Bernstein moment. It was about the hard hitting subject of lyric sheets. Why did the Novelty LP lack a lyric sheet? What were they trying to pull over on their fans? You’re a Dischord band for cripe’s sake--don’t you know the music is the message? Robbins threw it back at me, polite but firm. That was intentional on their part. Very much so. He didn’t want a lyric sheet--they weren’t a protest band, they were doing something different than their counterparts on the label. I had some sort of lame follow-up question filled with knowing self-righteousness, first they came for our lyric sheets...then they took our freedom, etc, but he had pretty much shut me down.

I know at least that my mom taught me enough to thank him for his time, and then I hustled out of there. The T stops running earlier than it should in Boston. I walked back towards my dormitory on Beacon Street in the biting New England cold. Across the Mass Ave Bridge where the wind whipped off the Charles like a knife.

I never transcribed the interview. I never developed the roll of film. Instead I skipped class, ate a lot of pizza, and played World Cup Pinball until the semester was over. I think I was embarrassed by what a poor journalist I was--or maybe I just lacked the hustle. I’m sure both the camera and the tape are now in a landfill somewhere, buried under twenty-two years of garbage. A golden apple of the past, lost except in memory.

Side One of Led Zep Four

When I was in high school, kids wore Led Zep shirts. I didn't, because I was a self-righteous little snot of a hardcore kid who thought Led Zep was tired bullshit. To me, the Bron-yr-aur Stomp reeked of thick-headed jocks in suburban backyard parties, a red plastic cup of Bud in their hands.

It would take me some years to come around to the popular music of my day and see the artistry in, say, U2's Unforgettable Fire, to say nothing of side one of Led Zep IV.

And but so when I was a freshman in high school, Led Zeppelin was about twenty years out of date. So the metalheads in my class who gave me grief and called me "thrasher" were wearing a t-shirt for a band that was formed before they were born. A band whose best albums came out when they were still gestating within their respective mothers' wombs or twinkling in their fathers' respective eyes.

I would go to hardcore shows and buy t-shirts of bands I'd see whose members were basically my age, so buying the t-shirt of a twenty-year-old band just seemed weird. It seemed cookie cutter and bland and empty of spirit. Book your own fucking life and all that. Disclaimer: I get it now. I'm not knocking Led Zeppelin. There's nothing wrong with teenagers liking them. Houses of the Holy rules. I like hobbits. They're great.

So now, two decades and change later, high school and/or teenagers/young people still occasionally wear Led Zeppelin shirts. Maybe not to the extent they did in the early 90's, but it happens. So Led Zeppelin is now forty-six years old. What I wonder is how do young people think about a wearing the t-shirt of a band that is forty-six years old? It would be like if, in my high school days, some kid was proudly wearing a Hoagy Carmichael t-shirt.

Does the modern young person wearing a Led Zep shirt feel about Led Zep the way an imaginary 1991 high schooler might have thought about Hoagy Carmichael or Bing Crosby or some other antique singer from another age? Or is that 1960's cultural bridge so pronounced that those of us on one side of it will always share a kinship not imaginable with the art and ideas on the far side of it? Or is it just that the consumption of media has so thoroughly changed in the digital age that there really is no difference between Led Zeppelin and Hoagy Carmichael? Or more precisely, is the difference between Hoagy Carmichael and Led Zeppelin like the difference between Beethoven and Bach, just two flavors of the same mildewed rainbow?

5318008

As far as the best research can uncover, in 1971, Gordon Henry Jakes (pictured above), a junior lab technician at Kozar Semiconductors in Modesto, California became the very first person to humorously type 5318008 into a digital calculator’s display screen, which as any third grader from 1982 can tell you, when turned upside down, spells the digital approximation of “boobies.”

“You know, they say the average human male thinks about sex every seven seconds or thereabouts, and I guess, back then, I was no different,” remembers Mr. Jakes. “If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been somebody else--I just happened to record it in our annual joke book the gang in Lab C did every year for the company picnic. So the paper trail is there. History’s gaze falls on me, oddly enough. Sort of like how they say language most likely arose independently in three distinct areas in the world, there were probably a legion of calculator users like me typing “boobies” and giggling all through the seventies. What’s really interesting, is the limited window of this joke. Who uses calculators anymore, really? At least not in the way they were used back in my day. Do grade schoolers still have a Texas Instruments calculator in their book bag? Or even if they do, they also probably have a web-enabled device that, if their parents aren’t careful, will let them access real boobies at any moment of the day. 5318008 can’t compete against that. I wonder if there were similar gags with similarly short windows of historical relevance. Was there some euphemistic pun made about phonograph needles, or butter churners, that made eight year olds of their own day snort milk through their nose as they tried to stifle a guffaw? I’m just glad I got to add my bit to the conversation.”

Steve and Heidi

Back in November, an old friend asked me to paint a watercolor portrait of him and his fiancé based on their engagement photos. Here's the photo...

...and here's my take...

Love is an Open Book

Big day fast approaches...

The Who the What and the When at PowerHouse Arena

I have an essay in this book, curated and compiled by Also Design and published earlier this month by Chronicle Books. My contribution, about a lesser-known member of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, was as much fun to write as it was to research. The rest of the book is pretty darn amazing--writers and illustrators working in tandem like chocolate and peanut butter.

The Also crew is hosting a signing/party event on Friday October 24th at Powerhouse Arena in DUMBO. Hit it up if you're in the area, or learn more about the book here. 

Hope to see you there!

Closing Time at the Double R: Why More Twin Peaks is a Bad Thing.

Sorry to rain on everybody’s cherry pie parade, but new Twin Peaks is almost certainly a really bad idea.  Let me count the ways.

You can’t recreate a cultural moment. Remember when George and Steven wheeled out a cantankerous Harrison Ford to give all of us adoring fans one last bullwhip ride on the S.S. Indiana Jones? We all loved that, right? Or how about the emotionally-flat new season of Arrested Development, that despite its cleverness and bravado, was somehow lifeless and drowned in its own mean-spiritedness? And all of us are constantly turning on our hi-fis to play the 1995 release of the Beatles’ “new” song, Real Love, right?

All three of these endeavors weren’t meaningless cash grabs, they were all the work of talented, passionate artists who were in love with their creations, but maybe a little too much. They listened to their own egos, and to the whispers in their ears, the millions of fans chanting “more,” a back beat of insistence that today is amplified by social media and Hollywood’s almost fetishistic enthusiasm for reboots. Lynch and Frost certainly have the ability to create something unique and worthwhile in another season of Twin Peaks, but why, exactly do we need it?

Yes, the series imploded in season two, spinning its narrative quirks into structural irrelevancy. And that final episode, written and directed by Lynch fresh off the set of Wild at Heart, was a meta-bomb of plot and character destruction that hammered a nail into the coffin of episodic television as being something worth our time and attention--it was an hour long hilarious middle finger to the whole idea of serialized storytelling. That final episode, like all of Lynch’s great works, is really a non-story. It plays off expectation, like the ear gag in Blue Velvet, like Sarah Palmer’s wordless scream in episode one, like Betty and Laura’s entwined tragedies in Mulholland Drive. It takes us out of our comfort zone. What I fear is that people want more Twin Peaks because they want to be back in the comfort zone. They want some more coffee at the Double R.

Is more Twin Peaks really about narrative fulfillment? Do we need to get Coop out of the Black Lodge and back to his tape recorder? Will the Bookhouse Boys finally come to the rescue? Whatever happened to Nadine’s silent drapes? The problem is that Twin Peaks was not a narratively-complex television show, it was not “binge-worthy” as much great modern episodic television is—populated with shows that are, incidentally, deeply indebted to Twin Peaks.  But the parent is not the child. Those shows learned from very specific elements in Twin Peaks’ pacing and structure and character development. But they are not Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks wrote a rule book for how to build a world that was deeply engrossing and sort of “more than real”on the small screen, but it wasn’t really concerned with those rules except in so much as those rules helped deliver a sense of moral unease, and an exploration of a certain brand of American cool that grew straight from Lynch’s gee whiz Montana childhood.

Can Lynch and Frost explore those same elements in another season of Twin Peaks? Sure. But all of Lynch’s personal work is about those themes, so that’s no surprise. But what will be a surprise, and not--most likely--a good one, is revisiting and diving deeper into the mythology of that little town in the corner of Washington state. Consider, as an example, these new Star Wars movies that J.J. Abrams and co. are filming. All the media hype around them seems to be about how Abrams won’t make the same mistakes made in the prequels. These will be grand, old-school space operas with hand-made models and rollicking story lines and rubber costumes and nary a CGI Gungan in sight. While I’m relieved that the world will be spared another monstrosity like episodes I through III, it seems to me what Abrams will create will be like an intricate toy model of a battleship you buy in a hobby shop. It will be an authentic recreation, stamped and numbered for avid collectors, but basically just a piece of plastic you spent too much money on. It won't be something new. Lynch and Frost will approach Twin peaks with that same reverence as Abrams is bringing to Star Wars, but to what end? Won’t they just be making high gloss internet fan-fiction for their own creation?