GIBBERINGS

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  09/04/10

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  Behold CLEAVER PIG.

  Although I have hunted desperately for the email that started the horror, and posted here and on Twitter looking for the owner, I can’t find the person who commissioned this piece. Therefore, I am making an official pronouncement: If the owner of this painting does not claim it by the end of the day on Friday, I’m selling it to the highest bidder. I will then refund the owner and send them a print, if they ever do appear.

  Bidding starts at $80

  PHARAOH HAS SPOKEN.

  Cleaver Pig original art auction [SWEATSHOP.tv]

  
  

  09/02/10

• When do you remember as the earliest point in your life that you felt that you did art better than anything else. I think you parents knew it by the time you were six.

  Mom claims I have been drawing since I was 1. I drew constantly and compulsively throughout childhood, but wanted to be a veterinarian. Art was okay, but it wasn’t something I took seriously as a career option. I had a gallery where I sold some things when I was 12, and I did illustrations and design for local club flyers, and some tattoo designs for friends and people on the internet. There’s some guy out in the world right now, walking around with a giant backpiece of Anubis holding an ankh-sword that he commissioned from me when I was 14. I think about that guy sometimes (he was just a client, I didn’t know him), and cringe a bit. I hope he still likes his tattoo.
  
  When I was still wee, the world blew up and I reflexively drew a political cartoon that, in retrospect, was notable more for its deludedness than anything else. I posted it on my LJ and got 300 comments overnight. In the next week it exploded across the internet. I cringe when I run into it now, as it’s been co-opted by gun nuts and teabaggers and the original message has been obliterated. At the time, I put the drawing on CafePress shirts and sold them to raise Red Cross donations. The Red Cross wrote me a very nice letter of recommendation for raising ~$50,000 for the cause, which got me into art school with some decent scholarships.
  
  Red Cross reputedly squandered the money on refitting their office furniture, and I dropped out after a year, but the episode convinced me that illustration had some power, both financially and emotionally, and that I could pursue it as a career.

  Ask me something, but it better be good.

  09/01/10

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  Duhhhh.

  
  

  09/01/10

• What are your favourite singers,bands, songs etc?

  IAMX is my current favorite band. My favorite living musician, singular, is Ben Lukas Boysen AKA Hecq. I owe both of these discoveries to DJ Intoner, who spins in San Francisco and Berlin, and formed much of my current musical tastes. My favorite composer is Jerry Goldsmith, who died a few years ago, which still makes me sad. He wrote my favorite film scores, and even at his worst he was brilliant. My favorite game composer is still a tossup between Michael Z. Land and Clint Bajakian, who together did the Monkey Island scores, music that’s far more beautiful than it has any right to be.
  
  If you asked me five years ago I would have named Splashdown as a favorite, who are still adorable and worth a listen.
  
  Hecq’s “Night Falls” album is, in my opinion, the opus of a living genius. I listened to it for the first time while I was drifting off to sleep in my freezing Edwardian apartment in the Oakland ghetto. As the first distant, clear notes of the track Bending Time found me out in the dark, my torso prickled and burned with how intensely, hotly, despairingly beautiful it was. I hauled out of my bed and stumbled to my laptop, where I mashed out a note to myself not to forget the name of the song. As Hecq gets more into harder, darker dubstep tracks, he’s split his ambient stuff off to be released as Ben Lukas Boysen. Both projects are mind-numbingly good. I can’t shut up about Hecq.
  
  IAMX is a little more known, and is the second band of Sneaker Pimps’ Chris Corner. I’m fascinated with the man himself, who appears to be one of these musical avatars with little in the way of real humanity, almost a Klaus Nomi figure. He’s a style icon and libertine, as rock stars should be, and I believe he has produced and is producing some of the most innovative and stylish pop music of this decade. The first track, President, on the album “the Alternative”, is literally a pop waltz. It’s one of my favorite IAMX songs. 3/4ths time, banging piano, an uncomfortable meshing of synth and real instruments, it lands somewhere between Muse’s pretension to Queen’s throne, and the old super-clean and tragic shrillness of the 90s’ Sneaker Pimps.
  
  Every band, composer, and musician has a Missionary Track: the song you send to savages to convert them to the cause. The one song that “sells” a band. It’s usually not their radio single, either, which tends to be wholly strange from its album (you’ve bought an album based on a radio hit and been disappointed, I bet). So here are my Missionary Tracks for the aforementioned musicians:
  
  HECQ
  Album: Night Falls
  Track: Bending Time
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VUxT0ZgZ0I
  
  IAMX
  Album: The Alternative
  Track: President
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irpXcuNeTn4
  
  SPLASHDOWN
  Album: Titan AE official soundtrack
  Track: Karma Slave
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAUtfY9zg9Q
  
  JERRY GOLDSMITH
  You’re already in love with Jerry Goldsmith, though you may not know it. He did a huge number of the iconic and incomparable Star Trek themes and scores, and tons of films. My personal favorite score of his, although probably not the best, is from the Mummy. His mixture of grandeur, emotion, and charm is unmistakable.
  Album: The Mummy OST
  Track: the Caravan
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMXOUFZxTjA
  
  That’s scratching the surface. We play music in SWEATSHOP.tv during the entire broadcast, so next time I have one, drop in and listen.

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  Ask me something, but it better be good.

  08/31/10