Category Archives: Art

Art, Links, Music, My Work, Photos

Weekly Tumblr Dump – 5/3/2014

Via my friend Harmony, This is “Swoon”, a song from the Soul Visions album. It is a collaboration made by The Human Experience and Rising Appalachia. Buy the album here.

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And then there’s Kieron Gillen’s post on Sister of Mercy’s “Alice”, for his upcoming The Wicked & The Divine:

We’re all monsters, at least for a few seconds at a time. I don’t believe you if you’re saying otherwise. Everyone I’ve ever met have failed that particular test of being inhumanly humanistic. Especially you. Yes, you.

There’s music about how you wish you are. There’s music how you wish you aren’t. There’s music which looks the world in the eye and tells it exactly who you are, and asks if they want to make something of it.

I remember Warren Ellis reading the script for Aaron Sorkin’s pilot episode for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and saying something to the effect of having the urge to quit writing. I’m still trying to get my shit off the ground and This motherfucker drops a post that questions my goddamn skills.

AND I DON’T EVEN LIKE SISTERS OF MERCY. Just…fucking…ahhh.

Anyway, onward.

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I’m still bummed I didn’t get to meet Molly Crabapple at her talk with Warren Ellis in early April. She’s a great artist and this is a prime example of it.

From her Talking Points Memo article “Istanbul: Before the Tear Gas”:

Used to battling cops at games, football fans formed Gezi’s frontlines. Now, the police are so afraid they plead with protestors to please disperse. “Children of whores,” the fans chant back. It’s a sweet change from the last few years of New York demonstrations, where cops often forced demonstrators into pens, beat them, and arrested them like cattle. Next to hundreds of football fans spoiling for a fight, I finally feel safe from the police.

I dive to the front. Amidst the A.C.A.B. (All Cops Are Bastards) scarves and E-ticket fuck no graffiti spray-painted on the sidewalks, a masked boy holds up a flare. It burns neon. From Galatasaray gates, fans have hung a banner emblazoned with the words “There is no description for our love.” Flyers fluttered like ten thousand birds.

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This is from a Harbor Magazine photo shoot with model Dino Busch holding fancy owls in impeccable suits.

Source: http://evenghostandhorse.tumblr.com/

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I saw Massive Attack at the Warfield in San Francisco in 2010, and I remember seeing this during their performance. United Visual Artists took care of the lighting design of the Massive Attack shows, and they put up a lot of digital protests playing the back while they performed. There were some that I can recall, like the rising digital number of money spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the phrase ” WHAT THE FUCK, ARIZONA?” in digital typeface in regards to the recently enacted SB 1070 law.

Source: http://inf0lepsy.tumblr.com

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Art

I’m the West at What I Do, and what I Do Is Pretty Nice

I mentioned the Kanye+Comics tumblog created by Chris Haley, artist for Let’s Be Friends Again, a while back. I said that I’d create some myself. Well, here are the ones I’ve made and are now up on the site along with other great mash-ups.

The first two came out like crap. I hadn’t used Photoshop in a while

Lyrics: We Don’t Care
Art: Clayton Crain

Lyrics: The New Workout Plan
Art: Erin Gallagher

Here’s where I step it up.

Lyrics: Gone (Ft. Cam’ron and Consequence)
Artist: Espeng


Lyrics: Get Em High
Artist: Steve Dillon

This is the latest one so far. I’ll put up more later.


Lyrics: School Spirit
Artist: Unknown

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Art, Comics

Mo’ Mashups, Mo’ Problems

Kanye West, despite what you may think of  his personality or rapping skills (he’s at about a 5 out of 10 in my MC-O-Meter), does make for good internet memes. Our newest Kanyeme  is Kanye + Comics from Chris Haley of  Let’s Be Friend’s Again fame,  which combines lines from Yeezy’s tracks with panels and images from comic books. It’s surprisingly effective as can be seen from this example:

My favorite though?

(And yes, I know that my title references Ma$e, Diddy, and Biggie Smalls and not Ye, but I’m working on my own Yeezy + Comics right now, so stuff it.)

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Art, Comics, Links

Comic Mashups to Logo Destruction

I love me some mashups, especially visual ones like the ones Kenny Keil did with comic book characters and hip-hop albums. My favorite is definite this Big Daddy Kane/ Avengers mix:

While on the comics tip, Adam Warrock is one of the co-host of War Rocket Ajax, a comics/pop culture podcast and a  rapper whose songs are actually getting past my normally disdainful opinion on nerdcore rap. It’s probably because I love comic books, and the hip-hop/comic connection isn’t a new one.

For all you webcomic fans, you should check out Chileno Juan Santapau’s The Secret Knots.

Dani Jones put up a pretty straightforward set of rules for creating comics: Make Stuff, and Show It to People.

Let’s get into a cyborg corner real quick: First off, while I think the title “Kanye West, Media Cyborg” is a bit of a stretch, it’s a great hook for an article that also has some great points. If you want to see the real deal though, check out the wikipedia entry on Neil Harbisson, a man who decided to install an eyeborg so that he could hear the colors that he was born without.

While on the topic of wiki-anything, Desmond Warzel’s hilarious short story “Wikihistory” plays one of the most known tropes in sci-fi, that of time travelers always trying to kill Hitler.

To finish this off, check out this Academy Award-winning short film by the French animation team F5 , Logorama:

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Art, Links, Literature, Poetry, Sci Fi, Science

Afrocyberpunk to Genocide

It’s really cool to see sci-fi writers from other parts of the world getting some press, so let’s all give  Jonathan Dotse props for actively trying to bring the cyberpunk genre to Africa. Sci-fi fans should check it out regularly to see a different take on what has become a rather played-out genre.

Turing it back to just regular science (if you can call it that), a group of British scientists have found a way to transfer all the genetic material of one egg  without mitochondria. The reason this is interesting is in how this could save many people in the future from diseases caused by mitochondrial defects.

Here’s an eye-opener: approximately 600,000 workers in China die a year making the parts for the computer or mobile phone you’re reading this from. They even have a name for it: guolaosi, which is Mandarin for “worked to death”.  The Consumerist article got its info from this Johann Hari article. Hari also wrote the amazingly good article on horrible work conditions in Dubai that I mentioned a while back.

For all you conspiracy theorists, reading up on the mysterious mass poisoning at  Pont-Saint-Esprit has a pretty interesting theory: instead of the ergot poisoning that has mainly been seen as the main cause of the psychosis people felt, one Hank P. Albarelli Jr wrote a book claiming that the CIA used Pont-Saint-Esprit as a LSD testing groundLSD as part of that tin-foil hat favorite,  MKULTRA . Add Rennes-le-Château to it and you can start making a pretty weird road trip in southeast France.

Comic artist Cameron Stewart, who happens to have a blog for all his artwork, has won a Shuster and Eisner Award for his own webcomic,   Sin Titulo. It’s a good noir fantasy story about one man’s descent into some dangerous people and some of his own personal demons as well.

I just got into reading the poems written by Jeremy Prynne, and I seriously don’t know what to make of it. There’s this odd lyricism that exists in his almost stream-of-consciousness poems that works somehow. Check out this introduction into the man and his work, and here is a link for one of his pieces, ‘Rich in Vitamin C’ to learn more.

To cap it all off, here’s a video of  Carlos Andrés Gómez’s amazing spoken word poem, “What’s Genocide?” (here’s a link to the written version):

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Art, Culture, Links

Alt/1977 to Maury Chaykin

To kick this series of oddities I find interesting off, Alex Varanese went on a serious reverse anachronism kick and took tech back to the 70s with his ALT/1977 series of false ads for electronics cool enough for both Steve Jobs and Burt Reynolds. Here’s a sample:

Comic book writer Matt Fraction had a great presentation at Comic-Con this year titled The Batman Dreams of Hieronymus Machines, where he talked about comics, his mother’s medical struggle and how that affected him, why Stilt-Man sucks so much, and how it all fits together in the grand scheme of things. It sounds like a rambling mess, I know, but trust Fraction, his work on Invincible Iron Man and Casanova are really top-notch.

Shaenon K. Garrity  has made a pretty humorous interpretation of Edward Gorey’s recorded love for Star Trek by drawing the famous “Trouble With Tribbles” episode in his style:

i09 dropped a pretty good list of advice taken  from sci-fi and fantasy books. There’s some pretty good ones from people in the comments section too, check that out.

Some of you might have seen this already, but for all the mashup/Palahniuk/Pride & Prejudice fans out there, I present to you: Jane Austen’s Fight Club:

Morgan Meis’ article on video games and the book Extra Lives is actually pretty refreshing and intelligently written. At one point the article reminded me of a line from “Little Weapon”, from Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool:

Imagine if I had to console
The families of those slain and slayed on game consoles

And I’m going to have to end it with a bit of bad news: the great character actor Maury Chaykin passed away yesterday at the age of 61. In honor of him I’m putting down a clip from A Nero Wolfe Mystery, which was a mystery program on A&E from 2001-02 taking Rex Stout’s stories and putting them on TV. Chaykin is the one playing the eponymous character sitting down:

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Art, Research

Happy Horny Werewolf Day: The Origins of St. Valentine’s Day + Funny VDay Cubee

I’m not one to knock on St. Valentine’s Day/Single’s Appreciation Day/ Hallmark Holiday #4. My point of view is that any day that produces any emotion, be it love or bitterness or abject Mafia rage, is a good one in our increasingly mind-numbing world. That being said, a couple of years back Warren Ellis posted up this message on the internet:

Always remember: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

I was intrigued by this message, so I researched this holiday’s origins. I found Lupercalia, which is a spring cleansing festival from Ancient Rome tied to the Capitoline Wolf . To put the most important acts succinctly, priests would sacrifice a dog and two goats, shower in their blood, then cut out the entrails of said goats and whip women with them in order to increase their fertility and ease childbirth pain. There is a more left field take to this ritual, however, and although it comes from a very questionable source, I’m not gonna let things like conspiracy theories get in the way of a good joke. Here’s a fun part from it:

As the Romans grew ever more sophisticated, the Lupercali would be celebrated by a man binding the lady of his choice wrist to wrist, and later by passing a billet to his object of desire, suggesting a romantic rendezvous in some secluded place.

On an unrelated but equally as funny note, I made a pretty amusing cubee for my girlfriend today. Check it out:

To all my friends: Have a Happy Horny Werewolf Day.

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