Hangin’ Out in Dirty Bathrooms

On the way back from the coast this weekend I stopped by a mom ‘n’ pop gas station bathroom and found this fantastic illustration above the toilet urging you to help these little guys the restroom clean.

Liquid Teevee

I learned from Twitter today that on the internet is a Liquid Television website that features all of the content from the television show. Even though I’m confident that I could have scoured the web and found all of the segments that aired, this certainly makes it easier. Plus, I’m not even sure how many times I was able to catch a full episode. This is part of the reason why I am so excited to watch these.

I remember the first time I saw the show: It was during it’s initial run and I caught the Invisible Hands cartoon. I think Aeon Flux and The Art School Girls of Doom were on that one as well. I thought it was THE coolest thing I had seen on television. For weeks to come, I kept on coming back to MTV on that same night and time hoping to see it again but I had no luck. Eventually I would catch it again but it never seemed to air at the same time twice, so it wasn’t often.

Part of me wondered if what made the show so mysterious and weird was the fact that I could never find it. So I watched the full Aeon Flux pilot and it was still bizarre and ridiculously violent. Invisible Hands is a beautiful noir-ish cartoon that had only improved with age. “Noir” being something that I am finding a lot of joy in after seeing Altman’s The Long Goodbye recently (I had a long post about that film that I deleted because it got too film critic-y).

I’m looking forward to watching the other segments because there are a TON that I haven’t seen.

A Bit of Bollywood on a Mud Flap

Most mornings I spend a couple of minutes wasting time at The Morning News combing through their daily collection of links. This morning I came across a link to a Flickr pool of painted mud-flaps of rickshaws & cycle carts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. I find these hand painted portraits endlessly fascinating. They are also pretty reminiscent of the hand painted movie posters from Ghana which were circulated around the web pretty heavily over the past couple of years. These posters featured artwork that seemed to be only inspired from the movie titles alone and didn’t have much to do with the plots. Most of them didn’t, at least.

According to ghanamovieposters.com:

With the arrival of video and video cassettes during 1980s In Ghana (West Africa) a small-scale film distribution mobile Cinema was created.

This small size mobile ” Cinema ” operators were equipped with a television a Video and some times with a small portable generator and were moving from town to town from village to village operating and showing their films! (During the day inside social clubs or houses and during the night in the open air).

In order to attract more customers and in order to advertise their mission and business the need of huge posters was created and born!

Talented artists after viewing the film were creating large size posters using oil paint on canvas!

The artist had the freedom to add or change scenes seen or not seen in the film in order to make the poster more attractive!

The Nightmare on Elm Street poster (shown here as A Nightmare) is particular favorite of mine.

Gee-Whizz

The past couple of months have been quite a doozy: two colds, a thrown-out back and a sore throat that just wouldn’t give up. I don’t normally fall ill that often, but this time I was thrown for a loop. Fortunately for all involved, things are on an upward trajectory now. I finally got back to riding my bike to work and getting to go on some runs. I didn’t really think I was pushing too hard because it felt great…but for the last few days by calves have been howling.

I came across the website of Dylan Jones the other day. Fantastic work. Inspiring stuff. Especially his logo work and he seems to have a lot of it.

Way up at the top of this post is the cover for City Cowboy by the Arthur Gee-Whizz Band. I love the cover, but the album is every bit as strong. I am a real sucker for this cosmic country rock sub-sub-genre.

Helping My Fellow “Burgh”ers

After a conversation about the patois of the Western Pennsylvania people, a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of a little podcast called “Da Burghcast.” Since we were both born and raised in the thick of Beaver County (a particularly rusty section of Pennsylvania) we were able pick up on the thick accents that most people associate with Pittsburgh. While it certainly does apply to the ‘Burgh, it also applies to a very large swath of the western portion of the state.

I listened to the podcast which is generally structured around the weekly NFL season activities of the Pittsburgh Steelers but the hosts, Herb and Buxy, would very quickly digress into almost anything else. The conversations include a lot of professional wrestling talk and obscure Beaver County (BC) references like the Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe, Flesh Mechanics (a Beaver Falls tattoo and piercing parlor), Charlie No-Face, and so on and so on.

Being an expatriate from Ambridge, PA for almost 10 years, it felt awfully cozy hearing the familiar tones of that accent which immediately made me long for the sweaty, humid summers and the biting cold winters. Plus, I still followed the Steelers…like any Western PA native probably would.

After catching up on three seasons of Da Burghcast and repeatedly staring at the default header on their website, I decided to offer my fellow Beaver County natives a hand and I designed a header for them. I didn’t know if I would be stepping on any toes since I certainly didn’t ask them if they wanted my help, but they were incredibly gracious and thankful and accepted my work and placed it on their website. Then they asked for more work if I was willing to do it, which I was happy to do in exchange for their thick-slices of obnoxious nostalgia that they offered up once every week or so…and thanks again.

I probably can’t recommend Da Burghcast to everyone because—unless you’ve spent your formative years in that area—you would either: not understand it, find it offensive, or, worst of all, not find it very entertaining.

Lonesome Life of a Poster

Jill spotted my poster for the PPCW Sexy Tuesdays Block Party on a pole at NE 20th and E Burnside the other day. It’s a good feeling to see my poster out there, in the streets, doing the things that posters do — even it was being pushed around by a couple of hardscrabble cardboard signs for some “MASSIVE GARAGE SALE!” up the street. Total jerks.

The Dancing Man

Click on the image for a larger version.

After doing some work on the logo for the band of a friend, I decided that I need to do more illustration. I used to do it as I deemed necessary for graphic design projects, but I’m finding that I enjoy it much more than I thought. Yesterday, during my lunch break at work I went to get some pho and I did some doodlin’. Behold, The Dancing Man!

Something I'm Thankful For

The internet.

The night before Thanksgiving I was running a quick errand to pick up a movie and drive-thru food. As I pulled up to the restaurant’s outdoor menu to yell my order into the 2-way speaker, I pressed the button to roll down my window and heard a foreboding scraping noise coming from the inside of the door. Sure enough when I tried to close the window it jammed halfway up. Sigh.

This being the night before Thanksgiving, I knew that I would have little luck getting this problem corrected in a timely manner… PLUS, I knew how much the car window people would rob me once I pulled my car into the shop and sheepishly asked them to fix my busted window. So, I drove home, taped a garbage bag over my window and went inside to search the internet for how to put your window back on track and found plenty of instructions. Many of them had helpful illustrations.

Granted, the internet didn’t keep me warm or dry on my cold and wet and windowless drive over to my father-in-law’s garage on Thanksgiving day, but I fixed the window and, after an hour or so of tinkering on the inside of the car door, felt like I earned my Thanksgiving meal.

Saving Doodles

The administration building of the organization that I currently work for is moving locations. To prepare for the impending move, we are supposed to collect our personal belonging and take them home simply to keep tabs on them while the movers come to collect our desks, computers, phones, and other miscellaneous company hardware. When taking stock of my things, I came across several random doodles that I did on scrap pieces of paper that I liked enough to pin up around my workspace. I’m not necessarily sure if these tiny items are worth packing up and hanging up in my new office, so I am deciding to save them by posting them here.

Doodle of boney hand holding a soggy carrot. I believe that this one started with the carrot…

The tentacles needed to be attached to something, so why not a three-armed alligator head?

After Halloween we see a lot of soggy decomposing jack o’lanterns.