Sticky Webs

Another poster last week... They're coming in waves! This one is for my friends at CounterPulse, the amazing performance/community space. It's hard to believe it's been 2 years since they opened on May Day 2005... Now it's their second anniversary, and I was given pretty much free reign to do as I liked for the poster and postcard.

What's weird is that this poster is a return of the repressed. For one thing, the design is very similar to a sketch I submitted for Cat Power a few months ago. What a disaster that was! I did a total of 11 sketches, and they were all rejected. This one I really liked, so I was glad to finally pull it out of cold storage and put it to good use.

But even weirder is the fact that I've gone back to high school. As a teenager, I drew endless doodles that looked sort of like spider webs covered in oil -- and now the sticky web forms have returned. I guess it's true that what goes around comes around.

Speaking of high school, I was in San Diego for an EFF event -- that whole city for me will just always be in a time warp of the 1980s. I guess it doesn't help much that people in SD still dress like it's 1987. The last time I lived there I was 18, and I was such a different person. But maybe I wasn't... On this trip, I looked up my old friend Chris Whittal (who does not have a web page and so I cannot link to his amazing industrial design work!). Chris and I were buds in 87-88, and ever since then we've kept in touch sproradically. But it's interesting how easy it is to reconnect with some people. The only way to explain that is to say that we probably haven't changed as much as we think we have.

One quick thing to say about my friend Chris: He really embodies the word magnanimous.

While I was down south, I drove up to LA to see the AMAZING Mark Ryden show. I had to drive all day to do it, but it was entirely worth it. I love the way he references science and mysticism, and slaps them right up against crass pop cultural goofiness. He's my hero, even though I'm sure that if I ever got talking to him I would not agree with his spiritual take on the universe.

There is a store I like to visit in LA called the Cowboyz Shack. It's a kind of nirvana for fans of vintage western shirts. Whereas in San Francisco, I have to search fruitlessly for weeks to find a good vintage western shirt, down in LA they have a whole store with way too many options. Anyway, it just happened to be directly across from the Ryden show. If you're in LA, it's on the corner of Beverly and Laurel. Lucky thing I don't live there...