Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Art Dump


All I do is stare at pictures. Day in, day out....

Moon Patrol 

Moon Patrol is a 1982 arcade game published by Japanese game developer Irem. Here is a 29 minute video of someone playing it (no commentary). At some point since its release, some guy named Matt decided to use photoshop to combine classic illustrations, pulp art, and psychosis, then posted the results to the internet. He’s recently collaborated with a mysterious Tokyo-based entity named Son of the Cheese.







George Wylesol

George Wylesol once won a silver medal for his portrayal of superflat, superclean, deceptively boring suburban subjects. He’s done work for important people like The New Yorker, The Gaurdian, The Blaffler, and a Philly band named Circadian Rhythms. Avery Hill published a comic of his.







Elzo Durt

Per his bio page, Elzo Durt enjoys "designing album covers, organizing concerts, and, above all, partying!" Subjects explored by this no doubt handsome man include: Science illustrations suffering an onslaught of knives and analysis; Invasions of glowing slimes with dribbles defined by detailed woodcut lines; Advanced tumorous mutations of 4 colors or less. Durt did the cover to Carrion Crawler/The Dream by The Oh Sees (included below), and has a variety of frustratingly expensive silkscreens available for purchase.






Sunday, October 15, 2017

The Inktober 2017 Variety Pack



Close. Every year in October tons of illustrators, both amateur and professional, attempt a drawing a day. The resulting flood of visual honey is overwhelming and invigorating. I've been flopping around in it for the past couple weeks.

On this, the occasion of yet another Inktober, I've gathered a collection of some of my favorite efforts. Check out the Inktober tag on whatever social mediums you favor. Draw a thing or two. Do not drink ink.


















Friday, September 22, 2017

Sonogram by Grant Gronewold


A while ago I reviewed Virtual Candle, a collection of short comics, drawings, and photographs by Grant Gronewold, better known to the internet as HTMLFlowers. His most recent effort is titled Sonogram. Subtitled “hospital diaries 2017,” the book offers drawings, notes, and documentation from his frequent stays in the hospital for cystic fibrosis treatment.

Sonogram is filled with worries and plastered with documentation from Gronewold’s treatment. Everything from overdue medical bills to medicine lists to pamphlets on cystic fibrosis -- They are photocopied in, then infused with Grant’s meditative line drawings. These drawings range from bizarre to mystical but always retain that silence inherent in the clear lines and unshaded forms. This style is a big departure from the artist’s usual psychedelic-stoner color pencils. You wouldn’t expect Ronald McDonald to make an appearance, but yeah he’s there, either as a reference to the children’s healthcare charity run by the clown's eponymous fast food company, or as proof that Grant’s still got a sense of humor (maybe both).



This zine is almost a work of ritual significance. It is art under pressure, art under the assumption that the artist is, at any given moment, a couple months or less away from death. During those long nights in the hospital he draws his heart out not just for the sake of memorializing his experience, but to maintain his selfhood. In his own words: 
“When I die I wanna still be the person I always was, not perverted by my bitterness, distorted by the unhappy chore of living. For all the emo shit I tweet I still love life & im going to fight for that small piece of life that I love, no matter what a doctor says.” 
Grant goes on to talk about feeling a kind of all encompassing fascination in life’s most mundane moments, like being ecstatic about “watching the afternoon light bargain for space with the shadows” even while taking a shit or laying a shallow bath. He goes into a few other moments like that in the cellphone notes that have been photocopied into the book, simple things like a bus driver stopping to let a crow walk past or hearing a story about the life of his favorite nurse. 



Hospitals can be miserable places -- but to those who rely on them to stay alive it’s necessarily more than that. The paperwork, the neighboring patients, the doctors and nurses with their small kindnesses and transgressive ambivalence -- all that swirling machinery we know as “hospital” is where your life (and the love, loss, joys, and memories that make up your life) is sustained. If there is no permanent “getting better” for you, then hospital is, for better or worse, part of where your soul resides. 

So those recognizable icons that haunt Grant’s hospital, from the Nike swooshes to Ronald McDonald, to the spiders and moons and giant scalpels, are manifestation of his internal world intruding on the world around him. Like a magician, Gronewold conjures them out of himself and sets them to the task of giving shape to the unspoken and unseen emotions that live in his world. It’s only our world, at the bottom of it, but specifically, to him, it’s a world where our bureaucracies endanger his physical and mental health, where a prescription slip is a ticket to not feeling terrible for a while. 



Sonogram is low on narrative. It’s best taken as a series of impressions. I don’t think it was meant to tell a story, and maybe even wasn’t made to be published. The drawings and words in Sonogram are documentation of a coping process that leaves strange and beautiful byproducts. The mysticism and silence of these drawings is that same mysticism and silence that strikes all of us when we’re faced with our own mortality. They are sadness and bodily anxiety, but also immense internal strength. 

Sonogram is available via Grant's Big Cartel page

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Babybel Wax Bodysuit by Eric Kostiuk Williams



The main conceit of Babybel Wax Bodysuit (Retrofit Comics, 2016) revolves around those familiar Babybel cheese wheels you can buy by the sackful at grocery stores. Hopefully you’re familiar with them, because they’re quite delicious. Soft. Creamy. Babybel’s claim to fame is enclosing their product in a layer of soft red wax that you have to peel away to enjoy.

What most take for granted is that these cheese snacks, safely nestled in their wax armor, are in fact striking metaphors for the human spirit.

Williams broke into the indie comics scene with Hungry Bottom Comics, a series of autobiographical stories delving into his experience as a “feminine” gay man in an increasingly butch gay scene in Toronto. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read about it. At the time Hungry Bottom Comics is set, Williams felt jilted and pigeon-holed by a scene that was increasingly becoming mainstream and thus normalized. Normalization raised the cultural capital on the “butch” gay man aesthetic, or the gay man who who’s gay but totally doesn’t “look” or “act” gay. Being a submissive and loudly dressed gay man in this atmosphere got him side glances and teasing. William’s got flack from his peers, arguably, for just being himself. This gave him a unique perspective on selfhood and the signs we broadcast when we’re communicating our identities to the world.

This short comic is about externalities. It offers two largely unrelated stories and a few stray pages that casually muse on themes of presenting the self, protecting the self, and becoming true to yourself. How much of what you give to the world as you “self” is contrived? How much of it is for the sake of putting other at ease, or tricking others into believing you are something which you’re not? How much of that presentation was fashioned or imposed by corporate overlords or advertising executives?


In the opening story, “The Literal Word,” Williams recalls his relationship with the moderator of a comic book internet forum who went by the handle “Cross”. She was the “open-minded” Christian type, and he the “painfully realizing his sexuality is a liability” type, and the two bonded over a love of funnybooks. The two inevitably change, their anonymous, non-politicized internet identities ultimately failing to keep the real world out.

Later, Williams offers a science fiction fable based on the life and travails of Britney Spears. If you’re the type to groan at a sentence like that, I feel you. But as a cultural phenomenon, Britney’s life actually has a lot to say about the nature of identity in contemporary Western society. Outward appearance is something to capitalize on, especially when you’re born with, or work to build, a body and face people want to gawk at. It’s a well known business: building bodies, identities, whole personal histories. Williams examines this by way of the Britney Spears mythology of rise-crisis-fall-transformation-resolution. He gives us “Britney Jean,” a cyborg built by production companies, whose own true history is kept from her for the sake of the coherence of her manufacture identity. An ancient order of self-actualized women free Britney’s mind by using a milkshake to trigger hidden authentic emotions. Cyborg Britney obliterates the faces of some corporate totalitarians before escaping and learning the ways of the free woman.


Williams’ visual style is perfect for the subject matter of the book. He doesn’t go nuts with experimental sequencing, but he does make sure that each page’s panels break, bulge, and reach into one another. This works especially well for the first story, where the internet is represented as floating islands of tendriled fungi. Personally tailored identities and forum topics connect and disconnect on branched rhizomatic arterial structures.  It’s a good metaphor for the overstimulating information carnival that was the early internet.

There are gold nuggets of randomness placed at the very beginning and the very middle that serve as thematic glue. Their brevity and compact nature make them the strongest parts of the book. One in particular stands out. It’s about the “Gay Clones,” a derogatory term for heavily mustachioed and burly young homosexuals who multiplied in droves in urban centers in the 1970’s and 80’s, and Keith Haring’s artistic response to them. Though brief, the one page sequence is dripping with excellently placed visual cues.



Toward the end of the the second story, the newly liberated cyborg Britney gazes out into the desert and contemplates her intention to wander the world without aim for a while. She doesn’t just want to find herself. “I want to know I’m worth more than all I’ve given to folks,” she says behind her shoulder to the tribal feminists who freed her. This is the basic thesis of Babybel Wax Bodysuit. It’s William’s using his rich visual language to examine the nature of identity and outward appearance, folding and bending it like melted wax and seeing what shapes he can come up with. It’s worth a read.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Some videos you needed to see


Tonight, I set my research parameters to "visually interesting garbage," fell into Vimeo, and came out with these. My publication of these videos in list format is not endorsement or disparagement of any particular band, artist, religion, food item, livestock rearing technique, or drug. Actual plot lines may vary.

Alagoas “Ghosts” / Music Video


Highly-effective appropriation of native american images and rituals for the exaltation of  blindingly white aspiration-core indie rock. A witch drinks some drugs and has a vision, thereafter pulls a fungus elemental out of a portal and dances joyously with it. The spirit's rainbow spores infect the whole tribe, resulting in eventual genocide I'm guessing.




Synesthesia


Live action sitcom starring an old general, a lonely housewife, and their boring sons. Cats start jumping out of the stereo and the children poke at vegetables and porkchops with 6.35 mm headphone plugs. Then the stereo explodes.



“Batongo- La notte Dei Tempi”


Man spends a lonely Saturday night putting on an art show for no one and records it on a vintage super 8 camera. Intercut with flash-forward scenes of him partying at a nightclub, having made millions with his high effort, low quality art memes. Presumably he gets laid.




The Shoes Ft. Dominic Lord - 1960’s Horror


Animal rights fever dream. First, the cruelties industrial chicken farming are demonstrated in gory detail. Then, the products then seize the means of production, and giant roosters destroy several major landmarks. A skeezy hipster is filmed humping poultry. Dope rhymes, too. 



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