The Temple in Old Town

If, as you were exiting this life,
you were asked to write down your wisdom for the ages,
what would your book contain?

And in which temple would you dedicate it?

Pete’s Basement

Pete’s Basement is a show about comics broadcast on the internet from Pete’s basement in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They have been producing the show for two years now and have some pretty funny stuff on it, if you like comics and born-and-bred Brooklynites anyway. While I was drowsily manning my table at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival the other week they interviewed me about my work. Go here to check it out. My part of the show is around 9 minutes in. After me they go to some reviews of recent comics and then towards the end they go back to the festival footage. Check it out!

www.petesbasement.com

Aspirations

I recently completed my applications to film school.
Aspirations of becoming a director.
In addition to the rest.
No intentions of ceasing.

These are pics of the DVDs I submitted with my applications.

Follow along

Hey, I am just apparently learning about this newfangled thing called the internets or webbernet or innersphinctum or some such gobbledy gook. Anyway, I have a special kind of thing called a “blog” on this hip young communication tool. If you check it out every now and then, or even better if you forget to check it out, you should look over to the lower right where it now says followers. Then you should move what Al Gore and I call the “cursor” over to where it says FOLLOW, and then just click it. That way you can say you follow along with Thursday City News and we can pretend to be friends. Unless we really are friends, in that case nothing will change, except you will feel an even stronger connection to my ever shining love.

Smoke Signal 3

As you must know by now the very first Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival is coming up on Saturday 05Dec09.
The festival is free and goes from 11am-7pm. Located at:

Our Lady of Consolation Church
184 Metropolitan Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

The newest issue of the delightful Smoke Signal will be available at the festival. Come on out and get your free copy.

Below is the piece I submitted.



Click on these for readable text:

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

Our friends at Desert Island have collaborated with Picture Box to put together what is sure to be a great event: the first annual (maybe?) Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival!!! It takes place from 11am-7pm on December 5th. If you live in the tri-state area and care anything about comics or graphics you must attend. I will have a table there and it is free to the public. There will also be a lot of great guests and concessions.

Get more info here: www.comicsandgraphicsfest.com

And below is the Mars Vulcan with the poster/program as a blanket:

Gushing energy

I have been traveling like a sea turtle lately and haven’t had an opportunity for a new post.

This is a sketchbook doodle I did a few weeks ago while in conversation with a friend. Little bits of our conversation became texts in the doodle.

Enjoy.

Moving mountains

A hat has been pulled out of the rabbit.
It will be exhausting, but worth it.

The movie Elliott and I have been working on
for over three years now
is in its last throes of gestational activity.

The first screening will be tomorrow.
I thought I would not be able to go,
but Elliott and I pulled the hat out of the rabbit
at the last minute.

I start my journey at 8am this morning.
I get back to Brooklyn at 11am tomorrow morning.
A hell of a whirlwind tour, but worth it.

Elliott and I both woke up yesterday sweating
over the fact that this would be the first
major shared event in our lives
one of us would be absent for.

Well, the fates were determined to dictate otherwise.
Here we go.



Aristotle said:
“Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
That is almost too profound to fathom.

Up and Down

For every idyllic pony ride through Elysian fields
there must be a correlative sublime monster laying in wait.
It’s just natural.


“The way up and the way down are one and the same.”—Heraclitus

Uncle Envelope

I am working on a contribution to Uncle Envelope scheduled for early next year, but you should subscribe now! USA Today’s pop culture blog Popcandy just wrote up Uncle Envelope, so check it out, click here.

Beaver Vortex, or General Mechanics 101

Imagine the world from the perspective of a machine.
From a machine’s perspective
organism is alien,
nature is abhorrent,
existence is incomprehensible,
divinity is a fiction,
interpenetration is impossible,
infinity is a number,
value is an equation,
principle is a hypothetical,
humanity is a tool.

Hmm… come to think of it…
I suppose we see from the mechanical perspective as our default,
our a priori as it were.
Perhaps we should try seeing the world from the perspective of a human?

It’s a topsy turvy world.

City of Thursday City

It’s here!

After quite a long time and a lot of work the City of Thursday City website has finally arrived.

Here is the url: www.thursdaycity.com

That will take you here:


This is the portal for all the Thursday City sites. Click on website to enter the main stage. There is a lot of content so make sure to scroll around a bit.

Here are some other screen grabs:

Panta rei

What begins as a trifle becomes an imperative. Impossible to ignore.
What begins as a pain becomes a pleasure. Impossible to resist.
What begins as a wonder becomes a bore. Impossible to recover.
What begins as a birth becomes a death. Impossible to remember.

But what has no beginning is becoming, becoming is its own end.

To be or not to be is not the question.
To be anything at all is already wonderful enough, if it weren’t so familiar.
To be consumed with not to be is nihilism.
But not to be is much more comprehensible than to be.

To be only seems obvious because we are oblivious.

Giovanni, cousin to Rocco

Rocco is friendly and generous. Rocco’s cousin, Giovanni, burns holes into continents. But don’t allow that to dissuade you from appreciating him! Divinities can’t be held to the same rules as merely mortal creatures like man. We assume too much when we daily take our human domain for the entire universe of laws and values. Just because Giovanni may destroy entire land masses and civilizations do not compare him to the American military or the Nazis. He should be thought of in a similar way as the sun, we must simply and humbly pray for benevolence towards us.

Please don’t turn your deadly gaze upon us Giovanni.

Arson?

I was watching the Bulldogs on my DVR at 5am Sunday when a horn started honking incessantly. This is Red Hook so I ignored it for a minute or two. Then I heard a boom or maybe a pow. I looked out the window and saw smoke billowing up from across the street. I ran down stairs and called 911 as I saw this truck blazing. While on the phone I realized I should go back for my camera. I ran back upstairs and then filmed this, go to Vimeo or Youtube for the video. Larger on Vimeo. Optimized for iPhone users on Youtube.

I will of course be using this in some form for an authorial video, so for now watch it as documentary and later pretend you never saw it.

the High Priest

Our High Priest.
Mediator between the high and the low,
between divinity and physis.
He leaps and dances amongst the celestial spheres.
Has he forgotten us?

Why is he here?
He inspires us.

He travels to the stars,
so that we don’t have to.
What does he see there?
What does his silence mean?
He has to protect us.
He sees things we cannot fathom.
His laughter inspires fear in us.

Why?
He is here to help.

The High Priest.
Bridge between heaven and earth,
between spirit and soul.
He laughs and plays amongst the heavenly bodies.
Have we been forsaken?

Bento Box

I recently constructed this “Bento Box” of goodness for some friends of mine. I liked it so much I took some photos. It is comprised of two t-shirts, one poster, two postcards, two sets of four buttons, and one copy of “the Moth or the Flame”. I fabricated the whole thing out of cardboard, white electrical tape, and clear packing tape.

Check it out:

Gay Paris

Last year I posted here about a crazy trip to Paris for the film I am working on with Elliott. Well, I was in Detroit last week working with Elliott on a short film of my own and found this caricature we had done while we were in Paris. We were outside the Centre Pompidou filming a wild chase scene and I posed, as Les Griffin, for a caricaturist. My neck was in pain after posing still for ten minutes, but it was worth it.

Smoke Signal 2

Smoke Signal 2 is coming out soon. This is my contribution to the badass second issue.

I include the cropped images so that you can actually read the text if you are so inclined. But I try to keep the files relatively small so as to avoid a long lag time during loading. So you may still need to lean in close to read it. That’s okay though, computers need love too and this will give you an opportunity to get more cozy with yours.

Also this is the first appearance of the other Sunrays Brothers. Nikolas Nicodemus and Thorsten Sunrays. They are cousins to old Thursday City townies Jehosephat and Cucumber, obviously on their father’s side. You will be seeing a lot of them in the future as they are gearing up for a long odyssey of the body and spirit.

Correction

I don‘t know if anyone actually read the post “Bug eyed”, but it is not true that the Yankees engineered a draft for more home runs. Apparently they just shortened certain parts of the outfield and adjusted fence angles. Whatever they did it is definitely the case that fly balls in other stadiums are home runs in Yankee Stadium. I just bought into the idea of the breezeway because it sounds like such a Yankee thing to do. I still deep down want to believe it.

Because it sounds like such a Yankee thing to do.

Pops, I know you’re a fan, but I just can’t like those dirty Yankees.

Rolling black outs

Last week saw an as yet unexplained series of events cause rolling black outs amongst most of Thursday City. And constant blackout in particularly hard hit areas. Unfortunately we here at Thursday City News were one of the “hard hit areas,” and therefore have been unable to post updates. But we are happy to say power is back up. If the cause of the blackouts is discovered you will be the second to know.

Sing muse

I am in the midst of reading the Iliad. These are some sketches I whipped out while reading.

We start with Athena stepping in to curb Achilles’ infamous rage at Agamemnon. And then Zeus makes a promise to Achilles’ mother, Thetis. And later Agamemnon wields his lordly scepter and addresses the Achaean hordes.





There is about to be blood shed!

Bug eyed

Whoa. It’s suddenly been a month since my last post. I have had a busy one.

Mary and I went on a baseball stadium tour of the northeast with her parents and brother, here-to-aft referred to as Broster. Philly had the best beer selection by far. We estimated over 40 craft breweries, maybe more. Yankees had the best regular hot dog, but the worst stadium. What a waste. Billions of dollars to basically rebuild their old stadium, address none of the old stadium’s most egregious problems, i.e. traffic flow, and actually diminish the best aspects of the old stadium, i.e. proximity to the field. It was impressive to look at, but basically a claustrophobic indoor mall which as an after thought was equipped with a baseball field, and to top it off they engineered a draft to lift balls that should be routine outs into homeruns. Typical New York obsession with surface and stats over substance and spirit. Fenway was the most authentic by far. A great place to watch a ball game, and my home town/state Braves won, so that was doubly enjoyable. Mets was most comfortable and felt like a real park, but the Cardinals lost so that was disappointing. And Camden was like an old beat up brick warehouse, all the best and worst that implies. They played the best music though. All in all a delightful trip with a lot of good food and fun for the whole family. But with Broster around it’s hard not to have fun.

If you haven’t been by thursdaycitywares.blogspot.com has been updated with some t-shirts and new posters. Also while on the trip I stocked several stores with copies of “the Moth or the Flame”. In Boston/Cambridge the wonderful people over at the Million Year Picnic picked up several copies. Definitely one of the best comics stores in the country. Also Comicopia grabbed a couple.

Well I have been working on lots of ideas and sketching, but the only image I am going to post is a photo I took at the Met today. Anish Kapoor shows us the way an insect with compound eyes sees. I did nothing to alter this photo. Notice the guy in the left getting his camera prepared.

The results are in

All in all MoCCA Fest 2009 was a success for Thursday City.

Day one started in a disheveled fashion as there were several hiccups on the museum’s part in getting it going. They had not gotten the inventory of several publisher’s to the venue in time, and there was also some trouble with their cash registers. This was quite frustrating, but not exactly unexpected. There seems to always be some kind of snag or snafu when people are involved. While the crowds grew outside the publishers who received their inventory late scrambled to get set up. Drawn and Quarterly were one of the publishers who waited and they were also only separated from us by one table, so that was exciting. I expected to get some spill over from their table. I don’t know if we did or not, but it was nice being near a lot of quality books.

I shared the table with Kristin “Li’l’ Bear” Lindner of Uncle Envelope fame, and we had a good time being comic peddling hucksters throughout the weekend.


In this first sequence of images you can see the set up taking place. Drawn and Quarterly waiting for their goods. And then the way our booth looked with no people in it.


In the second image you can see the Drawn and Quarterly crew rushing to set up after the books finally arrived while Li’l’ Bear mans our table with a smile.

Once the festival finally got under way the hall filled up pretty quickly. There was no air circulation and the place was pretty swampy, but it was quite an invigorating time to interact with fellow cartoonists, industry movers, and potential readers. Well, it was invigorating, but it was also exhausting. I found it much more difficult to get up on Sunday than it was on Saturday.

I sold a fair amount of merchandise, but probably the best aspect of the event for me was the interaction with people and the feedback I got about the book. I was surprised to hear how many people had read it or had it recommended to them. Tom, at Drawn and Quarterly, told me that he has had several people recommend it to him. I have no idea how the people are getting it up in Canada, but I’m heartened to know they are.

It was great to meet so many new people, and I just hope I can commit even a fraction of them to memory. All taken I would do it again.


The table from behind.


The people across the way.


Li’l’ Bear talking to the Chicago crew. The redhead is Neil Brideau of Sock Monster infamy. And manning the table with me is the always delightful Jordan Awan, a quite accomplished cartoonist himself.


And finally Superman himself, the inimitable Arlen Schumer.

Smoke Signal

Gabriel at Desert Island has started a free comics newspaper for the people. You know, the people that like free comics. The inaugural issue is to be ready for MoCCA Festival this coming weekend. This here below is the piece I created for said issue and some details so you can read the text.









Just in case you are wondering I am aware that a three eyed creature would rightly be called a triops, but it is Barnacle Clifford speaking in the comic and he is not as erudite as I am.

Open Studios 2009 Update

This weekend was a good warm up for the MoCCA festival coming up. A little over one hundred people showed up over the two day event. The majority were people I didn’t already know, so that’s good. Here are some images: