Wednesday, July 30, 2008

inking exercise

A little while ago, I posted this drawing. I decided to practice my brush skills today, and so went hunting for a suitable pencil drawing to victimize. The results:



Totally effed up the hat and his hands, but I like the results in the drapery.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Imaginary musical genres, 1

As a sort of thought exercise, I have been trying to come up with a few imaginary genres of music that do not yet exist. The first one is

Greasecore

Car culture has for too long been caught up in the flamejob, hellbilly, Bettie Page bangs thing. As our culture of excess begins to devour itself, it seems natural that automobile enthusiasts must, like their hobby, change or die. I am envisioning a grafting of the motorhead, hotrodder scene with the blazing zealotry of some aspects of the alternative fuel movement. Yes, I run my car on stale fryer grease, but man does it go!

The cheeseball hippy bullshit and defanged world music preferred by the current biodiesel acolytes will most emphatically NOT transfer to the custom car crowd (should it be Kustom Kar Krowd?), whether they are more Big Daddy Roth, or more Lowrider Magazine. What is needed is a fusion of the amphetamine-crazed spirit of the subculture with the utopian vision that is their only hope for salvation. I am envisioning something that combines the perfect aural vistas of classic Kraftwerk with the musique concrete aesthetic of early-period Einsturzende Neubaten, peppered with the sense of danger and abandon of rockabilly (because, really, can you really purge the rockabilly from the hotrod scene?). A sonic dreamscape of a perfect future where the individual can travel wherever they like at breakneck speed, without destroying the world. An epic poetry of automotion, told in the voices of the very machines they love, with the reminder of the grinning face of death (black cat clutching a firecracker on the forehead of a skull with snake-eyes dice in its sockets, skeletal hand wrapped around an 8-ball gearshift wearing a Bettie Page wig) never very far away.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

So, if I were a creative person, I would write some gripping content, and not rely upon Youtube videos to make up the bulk of these posts.

This is how I feel most days. Frank Black really does a better job than I can of explaining it all.

Mark E. Smith has made a career of that moment when you're singing a karaoke song that you think you know, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea how the verse goes. Only he writes the songs. I know it sounds like a bloody mess. You should see them live; it all will make sense.
There are a few questions that arise in any assessment of the late '70s U.K. punk rock scene. How did Joy Division become New Order? How did Johnny Rotten have the wherewithal to bring together PIL? And how did Howard Devoto manage to create pop-punk and move on to Magazine?

Something Brief

Cory McAbee's The American Astronaut is one of my top two or three favorite films of all time. And so naturally, I am waiting faithfully for his next feature. I am terrified that that might never happen, the vagaries of funding for visionary artists being what they are. He was, however, tapped to produce a straight-to-cellphone short a few years ago that I think is worth everyone's time: