Eventually, It Came True.

March - Hellboy.

Continuing the 2015 calendar project, this month we have the incomparable style of Mike Mignola. By far my favorite comic artist and writer. Here we have HB and Kate Corrigan enjoying a bowl of ramen at Chuko in Prospect Heights Brooklyn, the location of my girlfriend's and my first date.

Night Before Le Tour

The Tour de France begins tomorrow. This will be the first year I watch with any interest. I recently read the book It’s All About the Bike and it got me seriously into the idea of long tours. Learning about how these multi-day races began and what those first competitors suffered through made me look with a pretty critical eye on the modern Tour de France - with its teams of mechanics, daily massages and limit per day. In the old days (some hundred years ago), these men would ride as long as they possibly could (in extreme cases, up to three days without getting off the bike). They were often drugged up and half-crazed and some people died, so I suppose this had to be addressed at some point. Learning a little more about the course I’ve decided the daily set stages and all the pampering of the riders at each day’s finish line does not detract from the challenge of what must be an excruciating 3 weeks. So, I’m pretty excited to see some serious bicycling. I think also, they pee on the bike. Here is what I imagine each competitor will be dreaming tonight.

My Year In Bicycles

I’d say my cycling enthusiasm level is now “avid.” It’s been about a year of serious riding for me (or since I was convinced to take my roommate’s 80s Schwinn road bike after he left for another coast of America). The bike was impossibly small for me and he’d kept anything related to comfort free of what he called the bi-cycle (top right).  I believe the frame was 51cm, with a plastic seat (I have to call them saddles now that I’m avid), and awful, bare drop handlebars. These words may mean little to you - simply put, the bike was a pain in the ass. And hands. And back. But, I speak of the bike in an ungrateful tone, which is completely the opposite tone I’d like to be speaking of it in. The bicycle was my entry into the mania that now permeates my everyday life. I returned the borrowed mountain bike (top left) I’d had for several years (having ridden it a handful of times [which was also far too small for me]) and set out every late-spring day on that little red beast to try to get my confidence up riding in the city. I’m getting ahead of myself however, I had to ride every day just to learn how to deal with something so foreign. The first time on a road bike is extremely unnerving and seems wrong - the way a lot of things you’ve never done and go against your basic human understanding of ‘how the world should work’ feel wrong. Two skinny inline wheels should not stay upright, especially when adding a skittery, lanky 140 pounder on top. Once you’ve given into the magical psuedo-science keeping a paper thin bike upright, you have to deal next with the posture a classic road bike thrusts you into. Riding on the top of drop bars is not comfortable, especially for a person with wide shoulders and lanky arms (me, I’ve already mentioned my lank) - but what’s worse is the leap of faith you must take to enter the lower part of the curved drop handlebar. If flashes of your face grating against the sidewalk don’t instantly pop into your mind, you’re a brave person with a brain problem.

Suffice it to say, I learned to ride the bicycle without too many issues - and through daily riding and an ever increasing interest in how the parts worked, I was well on the way to my present compulsion, need, and desire for all things bi-cycle. After taking the Schwinn to a bike shop and complaining of outrageous back pain, I was told the bicycle was about 4 sizes too small for me. They set me up on a monstrously large bike and it fit and was a revelation to my atrophying back. So I got a new bike (not pictured) and donated the Schwinn to a friend who still rides it lovingly to this day. My new bike was a low-end fixed gear that was promptly stolen after 3 months of use outside a bagel shop. I hope someone is enjoying it (or its various stripped-off parts) - I did, for the short time I rode it as it gave me a brief but thorough look into the world of fixies - a dangerously associative world I may not have escaped if my ride hadn’t gotten jacked. Despite thinking not all that highly of the New York fixed-gear order, I got another fixed-gear bicycle (bottom left) - but a nice, proper one. It was not long before I threw a freewheel on there though, and indulged myself a little coasting. The rest of My Year In Bicycles involves a lot of conversing with my old roommate who bequeathed the Schwinn to me about bicycle parts, trips we’ll take, and bicycles we need to buy. We’ve both begun a small collection at 2 a piece with a 5 bike plan in the works. My latest acquisition is an old French road bike (bottom right) from the mid 70s that I rescued from a Salvation Army and cleaned, painted and rebuilt as a fairly faithful restoration. I’ve begun training on this monster for a long trip myself and the Scwhinn’s original master are planning. I will always think very fondly of that little bicycle and the awfully wonderful time I had riding it.

Season 3 Episode 13 in which two highschool girls experience the true power of planetary alignment! They kill baby Ryan Reynolds and are accused of Satanic conjuring by an increasingly agitated town. Some dude gets murdered by a spring... great episode.

This is part of an ongoing project to catalogue the villains from the television series X Files. Check out the others here!

That time again, DJ Lani Love’s new wintery mix. Cover art by me as usual. This is my favorite one thus far, so put it in your eartubes.

In the 1990 movie Marked For Death, Steven Seagal must take down a Jamaican druglord named Screwface. In it, there are a lot of Jamaicans, and when they talk about Screwface, it is awesome. At the risk of seeming insensitive to the Hollywood portrayal of Jamaicans, I’ll tell you I have a phrase that I often say whenever I hear the word face, and that is “witch ya scroo feese mon.”

Anyway, I’m working on a face / avatar generator app for the iphone and ipad. I’m pretty pumped about it. Below is the loading screen, homepage and main face-making page. I like the style and am starting to crank out the assets. Hope you like it - coming soonish!

On Mustaches

During May, my friend and I entered into a collaborative competition of mustaches. We both vowed to grow a stache and it turned out to be a good time because neither of us really needed to be seen by anybody potentially important for about the whole month*. The first few days were easy because I don’t like shaving and only do so every three days. After a week, it got pretty hard. Anyone with sparse facial hair will know the embarrassment and overall badlooks of a thin beard. It wasn’t for a few weeks that I could shave and have my face noticeably be-stached. Once this happened the hardtimes got worse, because I looked very much like a guy who is up to no good - but I powered through, growing the heck out of this rough stuff. I ended Mustache May with a serious fumanchu. Since the end of the month, though, I’ve been unable to shave it completely off. I even went so far as to allow myself a small soul-patch and it concerns me. I took inspiration from a French zombie movie where my darkened, Parisian doppelgänger had a superlative handlebar with flavor-saver. We’ll see where my facial hair takes me. For now, have a look at the evolution.

* we can argue about how you can meet someone important at any time, but this really was a long shot considering what we were doing and where we were.

At the end of a week, sometimes you just need to get Airborne.

The "let go dilemma".

My Life as a Musician and the Importance of Failure

After college, I was pretty sure I’d end up being a musician of some sort. The last year of film school really took it out of me. I got overly ambitious with projects and continually shot myself in the foot with intended scale, failure to adapt and refusal to scale back. I failed about as hard as I ever have that final semester and the summer after, about all I did was sit on porches reading comic books and rode a bicycle. In hindsight, I do think the experience was good for me. Since then I’ve learned to get things out, not only to have them done and off my plate, but to push myself to produce more and worry less about any work’s reception. It’s a balancing act of perfection and timeliness, a constant struggle that makes or breaks me daily as a designer and illustrator.

But back to music, I spent about a year after school concepting and working on an EP in my childhood home in Maryland. I’d write and record music for most of each day. Many months of this ended up in my being broke and a bit burnt-out on music. I kept producing the EP but started looking for a part time job. I was lucky enough to have a friend who had moved to New York after school and had a small illustration gig for me, illustrating tarot cards for some website for maybe a movie I think. Anyway, it went alright and it got me back into something I’d done my entire life but hadn’t much considered since highschool: drawing. I took the moderate success of the illustration gig and started scouring Craigslist for freelance design gigs. I suppose the rest is history, to skim over the agonizing period where I hunted awful Craigslist ads to work on my chops. As this started becoming more and more something I saw myself doing, maybe even for a career, the album started working on me in a bad way. I felt like I didn’t have enough time to finish it and I’d devoted so much time and energy on it already. So in a last crazed push, I slapped the thing together, called it Brighten Up Sourpuss (a directive and goal for me at at time of pretty extreme isolation) and sat on it. I had always intended to “shop it around”, whatever that means, and go on tour with it… I know. So, I went on with the design life, moved to Brooklyn and set about carving out a place where I could work for myself doing something I liked (something that didn’t make me as crazy as music did) and gave me the time to enjoy other things too (friends most importantly).

Well, here is the result of those many months in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by drums, cables, microphones, guitars, a xylophone, a banjo, a recorder, harmonicas, and anything else that I needed to commit to audio. It was a good time (again, in hindsight) and I’m rather proud of what I produced. I hope you enjoy it.