new pictures

I read a lot of music sites and I saw something awesome on pitchfork about how the local news in wisconsin did this story about justin vernon and his family. It's so good because it's so completely normal and real. I'd love to see more stuff like this on the local level.

http://www.weau.com/home/headlines/ASSIGNMENT_13_At_Home_with_the_Vernons_138621779.html
besides that though, did a couple new drawings. working on a few big ones all about the US. A couple of pictures about sports. they're bigger and mostly about missing certain things from the states. but here's a couple of these smaller ones for now. I'll put them up in the picture gallery section too.

nice shot

such a well-made cover

photo by Joel Van Houdt

from this NY Times mag cover story.

bus stop sunrise :)

 

and then sun up at the bus stop across the street... 

8am walking to work. ohradni street

outside of work

woman outside of wor

trying to do different stuff. see the paintings over here that I just uploaded if you want. just a few of the bigger ones I had to take to the park and take pictures of them under the watchful eye of Jan Žižka.

vids

Watched these two really good vids yesterday. The first one is from a couple months ago about how lobbying works. insane.



This one on Steve jobs is also awesome. I haven't read the book but it's about that.

  hearing Drake and hearing this:

 Declaring victory

Whenever you start a project, you should have a plan for finishing it.
One outcome is to declare victory, to find that moment when you have satisfied your objectives and reached a goal.
The other outcome, which feels like a downer but is almost as good, is to declare failure, to realize that you've run out of useful string and it's time to move on. I think the intentional act of declaring becomes an essential moment of learning, a spot in time where you consider inputs and outputs and adjust your strategy for next time.
If you are unable to declare, then you're going to slog, and instead of starting new projects based on what you've learned, you'll merely end up trapped. I'm not suggesting that you flit. A project might last a decade or a generation, but if it is to be a project, it must have an end.
One of the challenges of an open-ended war or the Occupy movement is that they are projects where failure or victory wasn't understood at the beginning. While you may be tempted to be situational about this, to know it when you see it, to decide as you go, it's far more powerful and effective to define victory or failure in advance.
Declare one or the other, but declare.

-seth godin

 sick dj shadowy song from the new free mixtape from Weeknd Producer DropxLife. Awesome maraca, is that what you call it? the thing you shake that sounds like it has sand inside:



Heard about it over on Pitchfork first. Get the mixtape there.

I don’t want anything to do with painting.I don’t want anything to do with design. Poetry poetry petry writing writing writing. Not painting. I can see walls with painting. But still it’s here/ Still it’s vcoming out. Still there’s eye and click of the brain. That’s it/ wish I had a video camera. Not about noicse but about movement and images and seeing. Seeing really is the thing.

treasure hunting

blew up one of the windows 7 icons I have on my desktop here at work to make this awesome picture.

loving this from the introduction to The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011...

not quite the whole thing but all I could fit in the scanner.

text is:
Every bow lost and every bow
bent. New leads (pb) on and
plentying free not to
new now by moments but
to just outskirt and be
about lead or about to
lead. And new adds based
and bent on circus or free.
New ads new leads (pb) from
surrounding areas squeaking
off or plentying free.
No new styles to lick and
note but certain new ways
out. Certain new ways
out. Certain new ways into
grease and squeeze box and
many.

a new book about Link

So I entered the contest by The Indoor Kids podcast this month. I mentioned I was gonna try a couple of posts ago.

The results came in and I won a copy of Gears of War 3. Totally awesome. Really excited. The contest was 'Make something related somehow to video games and win something related to Gears of War 3 (the game, an xbox console, game art, etc.)'. You can see a bunch of the other entries on the Indoor Kids facebook page.

For my entry I put together a 3-page story about Link from the very first Legend of Zelda for NES. I told Link's story from his perspective. But instead of starting out from home and ending in a dungeon somewhere, I tell it in reverse. It starts with the end of his journey and him, sadly, losing this life. Then it goes in reverse back to when he's just left home on his quest. It's a mix of different kinds of writing and drawing with some collage too.

Here's a bit more detailed description of what the book is about. It's called Link's Story (or you can just scroll down and read it below):

• The main page is the title page. Link's Story. There's a short description in the top half of the page that tells you what's on all the pages to come and what will happen. On the bottom is a poem written inside one of the dungeon rooms. If you haven't given up yet after seeing this page :) the story begins on the next page.
• The first page of the story shows Link losing his life. He's comforted by a woman there. The writing in green is Link speaking or thinking. He is basically trying to convince the woman to help him up. He doesn't know how badly he's hurt. She's telling him to rest now. At the very end she gives him a bit of advice about approaching things differently next time. There are other things on the page too. There are a bunch of small boats around the main picture. There's also a lot of writing, some legible, some not so legible. That's all the stuff going on in Link's head at this point. It's the end of his journey, and he wasn't successful. This is sort of the messiest page of them all. Not to worry, they get less messy as we go.
• On the second page of the story Link is fighting a battle. The writing is all him. He's talking about this weird feeling he has that a boy just like him will come after him and finally succeed, even if he doesn't. He snaps out of it and starts to motivate himself to fight.
• The third page of the story is Link writing down his thoughts relatively shortly after he's left home on the quest. The writing is all from his voice again on this last page. He talks about what he remembers, what he misses. The picture is home.
• SPOILER! There's one last little hidden thing that I may as well explain. I wanted the book to be like the Triforce. Just like the Triforce has three parts (Wisdom, power, courage), each page represents each of those parts in that order. And if you haven't already noticed it, if you take the odd looking boat in the upper right of the first page (not the cover page) and flip it over, it fits into the picture on page two. And take the garage sort of building to the right of the house on the last page, flip it over, and it also fits into the picture on page two. Just tried to tie the whole thing together from the start.

Here's my entry:
Link's Story

That's all there is to it. I hope you hung in there for it and maybe even enjoyed it.

New book Still Hunting

I finished up a new book called Still Hunting about a still hunter.

The amazing video game podcast The Indoor Kids is having a contest and I'm gonna try and enter. They're looking for anything to do with video games, like fan art, essays, whatever. So I'm gonna try. I've been working on something since last week. Something to do with Link from the original Legend of Zelda for NES and the basic story of a kid leaving home to go on an adventure. So it's gonna be a three part like book sort of tho it'll only have three pages I think. It'll be writing with pictures like I've been doing in the other books. But this time very focused on the story of Link. It's not as weird maybe as the other stuff I've been writing. It's gonna come out all right I think.

I started with this layout of one of the pictures. Not sure what it is exactly yet. Link is in the middle and there are monsters to the left and right. The Triforce is in there. Hearts on the bottom maybe? Have to fill it in with other parts of the game.

p.s. lovin the new drake. esp tracks 6 and 15.

Some of the gorgeous pictures I came across this morning at Kostel svatého Kříže on Na příkopě in their pamphlets and what not. Play this while you have a look.

see?

I heard the whole second side of abbey road the other night at Cerna Vdova in Zizkov. I was telling P how cool it is. Hear this song? it's just one long track? notice how it's been going on like this for a while? It's all from the same album called abbey road. Funny to bring that to someone. Miles and miles and miles away from home. I've heard all the songs a hundred times, but sometimes you hear songs a lot then you hear them one time and they're different. So I read more about Golden Slumbers and it turns out Paul McCartney came across sheet music for the poem Cradle Song by Thomas Dekker left on a piano by his sister. The poem goes like this:

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
 Rock them, rock them, lullaby.

Care is heavy, therefore sleep you,
You are care, and care must keep you;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.

I'm not trying to steal this stuff. Most of the story is up on wikipedia. Just thought it was interesting.

 

This is what I was talking about before with Esquire. All the dumb ads. And wondering why we can't squeeze some words in there to get us into the head of the people in there. Sometimes there are these great shots of guy or a man and woman sitting in a club. There are all sorts of things that come to mind. So I wanted to use that somehow. So here's this one from a CK ad. The text goes like this: I knew change from glass. I knew stupid interrupted. I would learn. I hoped I would. But maybe I was too old already. Maybe I was 21 with a glass eye. 

That's that. Maybe it makes no sense to anybody. I like it though.

and writing is everywhere in magazines still. It's a different world here. I pick up Esquire for 300kc. That's $17 american dollars for a magazine that doesn't cost more than $3 back home. And they're not all the Style Issue. Sometimes they're thin. It's still important for me to see the advertisements and the articles and the writers. You can see the lines they spend time with. Usually it's the opening and closing lines and maybe something clever to close off a paragraph here and there. Some lines just flow to get the story across, but some of those lines get a lot of care and concern and took time. The ads mostly all suck. They have no idea what they're doing. Oh the money Gucci must pay for someone to come up with idea of a dude on a couch in a suit with his lips pursed. If there's writing in the ads usually it's something that goes nowhere. I don't know why they don't try to tell stories. Louis Vuitton was on the right path with Annie Leibovitz. But where are the right words to go along with it. A small story. Something about the character in the picture. I'm doing it though. I'll show you when I get my scanner hooked up.

how to get from the notebook to the printed paage without losing so much of the stuff I like