I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Season 2 Episode 2

click to go to my flickr for full sized version

via Drawn

Blue Tea covers a big swathe of 20s/30s travel poster-inspired Sci Fi art advertising interplanetary travel, time-jumping tourism and anti-Cylon propoganda.

I am taking a more mundane trip myself… first back to DC for the weekend and then a week in Seattle and Vancouver.

Mad Men is a show on television that I enjoy watching and a second season of programs has just begun. Tonight, I understand, there is to be another new episode, but since I watch them on the “iTunes” I won’t see it until tomorrow at the earliest.

I though the premier was a bit “soft”—baffling to new viewers lured by the unrelenting hype of the last few months and not much to offer old hands other than showing every single character (including “Dean*” the Accounts Manager who hasn’t had a line since Pete went on his honeymoon) doing… things to remind who’s on the show.

Maybe that was the secret clue? Whoever wasn’t seen doing something mundane in the first episode probably committed suicide between November 1960 and February 1962. Hmmm… Hildy the secretary wasn’t shown combing her hair or eating a sandwich or installing a dimmer switch or really, appeared in the episode at all. Hildy has committed suicide. That’s the big reveal for this season. Done! Solved!

I love you, Mad Men. You’re ridiculous.
Have some wallpaper for your computer of Joan. Click the image above.

• I mean “Dale,” and this isn’t the first time I’ve had a Dale-Dean confusion. I mistakenly referred to Mister Glasses’ poolside waiter as Dean earlier this week.

The most magnificient URL in the universe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_oil#Use_as_a_means_of_intimidation_in_Fascist_Italy

Our last new episode was posted this morning: “Book Report.”

Given our low average hits (1500-ish per ep) and the whole dissolution of SuperDeluxe, this is probably it for Cakey. So watch and cry. Or give it a million hits and then cry.

See all 7 episodes here:
http://www.superdeluxe.com/sd/series/cakey
or here http://www.mrghost.net/

The death of Cakey (secret 8th episode) is under lock and key in the SuperDeluxe vault and will never be seen again (legally).

Not as extreme (X-treme!) as Steve Don’t Eat It, I’ve been enjoying the taste-test reviews of horrible processed food products on Supertaster.

Processed food is amazing and disgusting.

Ice Cream People

I will be performing tomorrow at UCB Theatre’s School Night as member of the Suburburban-Virginia-and-Maryland-Themed improv group Beltway Bandits.

This is a red (line) letter day… I never do improv.

Among our many battles with SuperDeluxe (and battle conveys too much action and not enough waiting) was over the length of the episodes. We had to cut huge chunks out of every episode to meet their marketing directive that no one on the internet will watch anything over three minutes.

The first casualty of the policy was the credit sequence, including the new fully legal theme song Joe McGinty wrote for the show. We didn’t expect the Kinks or their label would give us “Better Days” for less than the price of a luxury yacht (Here’s a video of the song synced to blurry Xena Warrior Princess footage)

I’ve jerry-rigged my own blurry trailer to boost our sad viewer numbers using the ol’ title sequence.

I started making a longer video project… a “pilot” or short film or whatever. My goal is to finish shooting my by birthday this month and get it to the NY TV Festival.

Paul Rondeau is shooting it. Cast includes Jim Santangeli, Sue Galloway, Matt DeCoster, Rob Lathan, and Mitch Magee. And me.

Here is a completely irrelevant clip of Mitch ad-libbing. This will not be in the final video.

SuperDeluxe posted… The Babysitter today.

Watch, Comment, Link-to… etc. If you feel like it.

New NEW Episode of Cakey

I am applying for an art job at Google. I saw the listing and having a steady job with make my mother worry less. I got an email back of their “basic skills test”—

There are 3 parts to this test:

1. Develop an original, fun animal character illustration. – the animal should be a cat – the pose should be comical – free-hand illustration encouraged (instead of vector-based source file) – realism is preferred (but stylizing is okay) (??) – it should be full-color – image size should be: 1600 pixels x 1200 pixels – file format should be: TIFF

2. Develop 2 original icons that convey the concept of ‘Fast Download’ – File format: GIF – Sizes: 128×128, 32×32 and 16×16

3. Recreate the attached illustration in vector format
(a vector-drawn pad and paper, converted to .JPG that I have to redraw back as a vector)

My cynical nature’s first instinct was “they’re having me do spec work for free… then they will steal it.” I suppose I will watermark it, but is that going to insult them? (and how do you watermark a 16×16 icon?)

I’ve read way too many stories like this in illustrator’s and artist’s blogs. TRUST NO ONE!

This has already been written about many, many places but if you haven’t seen it—
Green Porno

Worth it just to hear Isabella Rossallini’s prononciation of “anus.”

Almost eight years ago (eep!) I was in a show called Feature Feature at the UCB Theatre. I will gladly chew the ear off of anyone who wants to know more about it, but for the purposes of this unnecessarily long buildup to a marginally related art file, I’ll describe it as a show in which a set cast of 9 played multiple character roles every week in an improvised genre movie.

Even though I was an Adobe Illustrator novice, I drew retro Shag-inspired/ripoff cartoon portraits of the entire cast for our very-circa-’98 website and then, playing to the strength of vector drawing, basically used them like Colorforms to do depictions of each show we did. I’d put new hair on them, or attach heads to animal bodies, and so on. I did a dozen of them, I think, and now don’t even know where the files are (it was 4 computers ago) and featurefeature.com is long dead and URL-poached.

So, last year I did a Mad Men Christmas card the same way (though hopefully with seven-years-more sophistication and less rip-off-iness) so I have “colorforms” of all the main characters of the show. In a bout of insomnia and inspired by seeing Remy Auberjonois in The Country Girl, I pasted up a disturbing scene from the pilot of Mad Men...probably the first time a gyno exam has been depicted in cutesy retro cartoon form… that kind of stuff didn’t make it into too many ads in Ladies Home Journal.

(click to see in large and lovely detail)

Permanent Midnight, currently viewable on hulu stars Ben Stiller as a scenery-chewing heroin addict/comedy writer. I watched this the other day and AV commented that in ten years, it could enjoy the camp status of a Road House.

It’s a total hambone over-the-top example of the 90s “heroin chic” movie… the music cues, Stiller’s “heroin face,” repeated sex montages, the non-linear storyline, and not just jump cuts but “jump dissolves”. Also, everyone and their sister plays a bit part in it—Owen Wilson, Fred Willard, Janeane Garafalo, Andy Dick, Liz Torres, Sandra Oh (for one line). It’s almost a dramatic “Reality Bites.”

Then, reading the credits we found out it came out in 1998, which is inexcusable. We were convinced by cliches that it must have come out before Trainspotting (96), Bottle Rocket (96), and maybe even The Ben Stiller Show (90).

By the end, AV dropped the Road House comparison, because unlike that genius film which shifts into insanity overdrive in the last act, Permanent Midnight down-shifts into boringness after a promising showing out of the gate.

There’s a week-old meme moving around artists’ blogs to draw yourself as a teenager (and usually contrast with now, but I haven’t gotten around to that bit). I have never participated in a meme before and I have absolutely no fond memories of this era, but I have taken a stab at it.

This is freshman year of high school; my main memory of this era is of my hair being huge and shedding like a Persian cat. And my repulsive school uniform was a magnet for it.

I drew this oddly… on paper first and then traced and colored with a mouse. Also, it much more resembles my drawing method when I was teenaged, so there’s some “synergy.”

(See other people’s take on it here, but be prepared to be bummed out when about half of the participants “looking back” are barely 20somethings and their “teen years” are when you graduated college)