American Madness

David Barsalou has taken the time to go back and track down the original comics of over 60 of Roy Lichtenstein’s works, he then compiled them next to the Lichtenstein prints and posted them online.

You get to see a comprehensive overview of Lichtenstein’s source materials and see how closely he interpreted/copied the originals. Some controversy has arisen over these early works as he never credited the original artists whose work he was copying. According to Wikipedia:

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Do you have incredible skills with a digital paintbrush? Love tooling around in Photoshop and creating really nice images to impressive your friends with? Well then Sketchfu is the site for you.

Oh, you don’t have those incredible skills? Well, neither do I, but Sketchfu is still pretty fun. Pretty much it is an online doodle pad that actually records your brush strokes. It is pretty neat to just play around with.

What is better though is watching some the replays of other folks who have clearly mastered the process. Oh, plus if you really like what you have drawn you can even embed it on your own webpage for others to see.* To see the best of the best, just jump to Best of Sketchfu and watch the work of the masters. Personally I can’t even figure out layering, oh right, plus I am not that talented an artist.

*Note, I have not even come close to mastering it, so I am just going to use their logo as the picture here.

So, the other morning I only caught part of the NY1 report on this project, caught it while rushing to get dressed and get to work, so it didn’t have my full attention either. What I heard was that as a celebration of 100 years of motorized taxis in the city they were putting decals of flowers painted by kids onto taxis.

Seemed a bit odd to me, but, whatever, I rolled with it. It kept in the back of my mind though, especially as I saw more and more of them around the city. And the more I thought about it the more it kind of bothered me- what did flower decals on cabs have to do with 100 years of motorized taxis? And these so-called kid paintings of flowers- they just colored them in as far as I was concerned. I guess I first noticed the whole thing going around Thursday as the flowered cabs drove by me, by Saturday I was ready to rant about it all in a post here. As I have learned though before ranting you should really investigate what you are writing about, you know actually read an article or catch a full news report…

Well, today I did my investigative research* and found the website about the project, which is called “Garden In Transit,” a Gothamist article about it from when it was announced last July, and the press release from Bloomberg on it. It is actually a pretty sweet (as in touching) project. It is sponsored by Portraits of Hope- They have provided all the funding for all of the decals and paints and such so that “children coping with medical, physical, emotional and socioeconomic challenges” can participate in it. According to the website:

This project will highlight - on a mass scale - goodwill, hope and triumph on a city, national and international level. Garden in Transit is an amazing collaboration of generations and communities that will culminate in a “moving” and jubilant field of flowers created by kids. The taxi will serve as an inspiring tribute to the capacity to achieve the spectacular.

Okay, yeah a little cheesy, especially the pun, but a nice gesture none the less. It just so happens to also coincide with the celebration of 100 years of motorized taxis in the city, so they say the two things are connected (though I am still a bit baffled as to how). It is a nice project and definitely livens up the yellow cabs in the city. Any cab driver can participate (with no cost to them), and volunteers are still needed for the program, you can sign up on their website.

The cabs will be displaying the flowers that were painted (there are 27,000 decals, so every cab in the city could participate if they chose to) for a total of 16 weeks, from now to the end of December.

*Okay, fine, I Googled Taxis, New York and Flowers, but I found what I needed

Well, not “The Man” as in big government. “The Man” as in really awesomely cool (and yes I realize this is the second post today to use awesome and I warn you, it may not be the last).

Let’s start at the beginning, you know who Banksy is, right? You don’t? Well here is his (or maybe her) Wikipedia entry. Basically, Banksy is a legendary British “graffiti” artist, though graffiti isn’t quite the right term… Street Artist? Still not right, um, conceptional artist… I guess that will have to do, cause I am out of terms. He gained notoriety based on his graffiti-esq street art, but also has redesigned Paris Hilton’s CD on its release day, substituting his own art work in the slip cover for her CD. A bunch of his art work has been considered controversial, but in his own right he has, essentially, become legendary. In New York he walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and slapped some of his pieces of work up in various galleries. In fact, this stunt, in 2005, was so legendary that the museum has actually added these pieces to their permenant collection.

Banksy now has a video posted on his site of how he walked into the museum and added some more pieces of art to their collection.

So, while it may seem like I am shilling for a friend here, that is only partially true. I really like these T-shirts, I have most of the Beautiful/Decay Artist series shirts. Beautiful/Decay’s most recent line has shirts designed by Dust La Rock, Jesse LeDoux, Aaron Noble and, my favorite, Jan Kallwejt.

The shirts are available online at the Beautiful/Decay store or at retailers like Blades

Also, Beautiful/Decay is having it’s release party for Issue S this weekend
Check Out the Flier Here

So now that the courts have rules that a Pennsylvania school district cannot teach Intelligent Design (a lovely concept that says some “things” were created by a supernatural being), we can now ask the questions that need to be asked.

First of all, is it intelligent design that a sewage pipe runs through our recreational area? What kind of supernatural being would design such a thing? A supernatural engineer who flunked out of MIT?

Plus, why only one mouth? It is very difficult for some people to talk out of both sides of their mouth, and if they had two, hypocrisy would move along that much faster.

Finally, why do some male genitals hook to the left? I haven?t actually seen this phenomenon in action, but some women I know swear that it?s true. They also seem to think this model hits the G-Spot much more efficiently. This is confusing. Does this mean the G-Spot is on the right? Can?t we all compensate by moving a bit to the left? Is this more information than anyone needs to know?

Questions, questions.

I really wanted to pose these and other queries to the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania. But now that the school board’s decision has been termed ?breathtaking inanity? by a federal judge, I?ll just have to ask my priest or rabbi or legalized Nevada hooker. Unless they overturn her, too.

I was in Greensboro, North Carolina when I noticed the man wearing a Waffle House camouflage tee shirt.

I asked, ?Is that from the Waffle House that makes waffles? Or is this a new code word for AK47s.?

The Waffle man laughed, put his gun down, and said, ?yernot from roundhere, ryoo??

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I thought that once you publish a book, the next order of business is to propel yourself into the life of the touring author: parties, book signings, adulation and groupies (with teeth, preferably).

What has surprised me about the launch of Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools (St. Martins Press) is the complete lack of sock-em, rock-em excitement. Yes, you conduct interviews, but they are by telephone, which you can do in your underwear while your dog farts next to you (a picture of this very thing is on page 63 of Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools, St. Martins Press).

And yes, you do sign autographs in stores, which the publisher encourages you to do. But unless you are a BIG author, no one shows up to your book signings, and you end up sucking on Cheese Doodles with very bored looking cashiers who want you to stop telling them what?s on page 63 of Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools (St. Martins Press).

So what?s the upside? Well, when you go to your class reunion, you can say ?I?m a writer?, to which the reply might be, ?great, did you bang Cameron Diaz?? Always say yes, except when talking to Cameron Diaz?s father.

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To: Heads of Sales & Marketing

Re: Keeping your jobs and our pricing strategy

All:

It has come to senior management’s attention that we’re spending tens of thousands of dollars a year trying to figure out how to price our items. People, I don’t care if that’s what they teach you at Harvard, Yale, or Wharton. At dear, old Pace University’s night business program, we learned business is all about moving product, and recent figures show me we’re not doing that. To that end, CFO de Krook and I want to roll out our new, more aggressive pricing plan. Let’s call it “Operation Undercut.”

Instead of pulling your chins and scratching your heads trying to work out toe the penny what our logistics and infrastructure costs are, here’s what I want you to do. When you quote a price to a retailer or wholesaler, casually ask what our competitor is charging for the same item. If the price is lower than the one you quoted–say forty-seven cents per item, compared with your offer of fity [sic] each–cough twice, slap your forehead with your palm, and say, “Oh, did I say fity cents a unit? I meant forty-six cents, because you’re such a good customer.”

I know you all work on commission, based on the size of the sale you’ve made, so I understand your fears that shaving margins will also sharply reduce your commissions. That’s why this memo is circulated on the same day that we’ve just introduced our new “Overpriced Executive Line,” basically the same office-supply garbage we already sell, produced at the same places and for the same cost, just stuck in nicer gold-colored and silver-colored boxes with ribbons on them, designed to make executives feel important and willing to pay 40 percent more.

So be of good cheer and keep those expense accounts down. Go forth and sell, sell, sell!

Onward and upward,

The Guy Who Writes The Checks