100 drawing challenge #1

In a quest for creative exercise, I am taking up a 100 day drawing challenge, the objective of which is to draw one picture per day for 100 days. Each picture is based around a one word theme. I started this undertaking yesterday, and while its not the greatest thing in the world, I like the way it came out.

The word for challenge #1 was Introduction. Right away I told myself I wanted to draw something revolving around the stage. I haven't done it in some time, but stage performance is, for me, one of the most exciting and enjoyable experiences I'll ever know. The word introduction evoked that feeling of waiting in the wings, nervously gripping the curtain, waiting for your time. an image that I really wanted to base this drawing on (despite the irony of its title) was the cover of the Rush album "exit stage left", depicting what I always assumed was Lewis Carrolls Alice nervously peering out from behind the curtain onto the audience. Those precious moments leading to the introduction are fierce and unstable. Each second can drag like its got a rock tied to it, or you can stop to catch your breath and realize that your time ended twenty minutes ago, and you're left with a vague, hazy recollection of what you did under those lights, and all you can do is hope the audience enjoyed it.

Inception Cat IS going deeper

I got nothin today. So here's something that I found funny.

(via Daily What)

this figure-ground illusion IS dope

Nothin like a good figure-ground illusion.
These are poster prints by Simon C. Page, on display on his tumblr page and for sale on inprint.com.
This one, "Batman vs. Penguin", reminds me of--you know--that one obligatory figure-ground illusion that is hanging on the wall in many middle school math teacher's classrooms around the world. You know the one. Is it a vase? is it the silhouetted profiles of two people?






Then there's the legendary:


first, it was, like, whoa, a woman's face, man...
then it was like, is that dude playing a SAXOPHONE!? RIGHTEOUS!
Page also made a pretty sweet "Spider Man vs. Green Goblin":














"is your dad a dealer? cuz ya dope to me"
- M.I.A.













Meanwhile, in Madrid, this happened:













i like it. It's by an entity named Blu. Shine on you crazy diamond.
























(Page's artwork and Blu's artwork were found via The Daily Wh.at

Language IS a helluva thing

I'm amazed that, even as an adult, my grip on language still finds ways to flex and tighten around the elusive concept. I like to think I learn a new word every few days, though I have no counts or data to back that up. I'm seldom discouraged at the flagrant abuse of language I see in the world around me, like humanity is--on the whole--backsliding on the BRB LOL way of communicating, peppering their sentences with "like" like so much..pepper.
Once during an IM argument, I told a friend that his spelling was "atrocious", to which he promptly laughed. Honestly, it really was atrocious. At the time, his grasp on the English language was tenuous at best, but my efforts to educate him on the importance of proper spelling would've been fruitless, like the escapee from Plato's cave come back to tell the others what he'd seen. I've been noticing this sort of mentality popping up in a lot of other instances as well:people speaking and writing and instant messaging in some endlessly shifting cockney pidgin with no regard for the rules of grammar or spelling. I dont proclaim myself the golden boy of the written, spoken, or instant messaged word by any means, but some, i feel, are taking it too far.

I've been reading more lately. I try to get in a few chapters of a book every day, if possible. Currently, I'm barreling into the last 75 pages of "Hell's Angels" by Hunter Thompson. Great read. Thompson, i feel, approached language with an almost supernatural energy, as if his words were divined by tea leaves or the placement of tarot cards.
I remember hearing that Hunter would sit at his typewriter, stalk still, and suddenly--ZANG!--receive a jolt of energy, which he would promptly displace upon the keys of his Smith Corona. To learn to write, he would type "The Great Gatsby" over and over, allowing his hands and fingers to feel the music of the keys re-creating what he believed to be one of the greatest literary works in recent history.
Once I finish "Hells Angels", I have several other books queued up. Next is "Brave New World", for which I could not be more excited.

I've noticed my personal language has evolved somewhat over the last few years. Some time in the last two or three years, I started consciously limiting my use of the "you and me" dynamic in conversations. When one says something like "you and I have a problem", it becomes an entirely too personal affair. That language is meant to be as deliberate and specific as a bullet, and it can make tempers flare if used improperly. "You and me" can have some positive value when talking to a close friend, or to drive a point home, but in my usage, i tend to avoid it whenever possible. Instead, I started consciously using the "we" dynamic in conversations, as in "we have a problem". This language communicates that while there is a problem, you're not alone, partner, for we have a problem together. I've noticed that people react more favorably to "we" versus "you and me"

Language can tell you a wealth of information. If someone says "...when i was young" , this language is polar, its night and day, as if youth is some innocence that this person once possessed and can never again retrieve. This is not necessarily true, though if the individual is talking this way, they may just be a sad sack and a lost cause. The tendency ought to be toward the expression "...when i was younger". While still an expression of haves and have nots, it suggests that youth is not suddenly lost and gone forever (LOVE that Guster album, by the way), but rather that it leaves or drains from a living thing at an unknown and unpredictable pace unique to that living thing. I find this approach to be a slightly rosier take on aging. While youth is both finite and temporary, I believe the individual can, with practice, retain some of it for the later years.
Fairy tales can come true
it can happen to you
when you're young at heart

this IS my blog

I've made attempts at this sort of thing in the past. Livejournal can be a strangely cathartic thing to a teenager, man..not only from writing about your own troubles, but from reading about the troubles of any random livejournalist, and in the process getting the necessary perspective to realize that everyone's got their troubles. some of those folks lead some interesting and complex lives. I digress.

Another attempt, my on-again-off-again blog called "fruit on the bottom, hope on top" (inspired by the late Mitchell Hedberg), was a mixed bag. I found myself scrambling all over the board, writing about whatever was on my mind at the time. Not to say there's anything wrong with that, but I found my delivery suffered an unpredictable variability. I'd write about my day, my weekend, a dream from which i'd just woken up.. sometimes i would just write about the emotion i was currently feeling, and all the stimuli that went with it. While effective--to a point-- at purging my bottled emotions, eventually my posts had taken on a routine where the reader was forced into the role of my "sounding board", reading all my whining and complaining with no truly effective way to share their two cents other than the post facto comment. not the most interesting stuff for a reader to stagger through, and not the best thing for someone wanting to draw hits on his blog.

All in all, I feel like I wrote a handful of good posts over the years. I could imagine my randomness being a little jarring to the casual reader, stumbling across my blog by heaven knows what circumstance. Perhaps some withered old crone at a crossroad of one of the great tubes of the internet--her glass eye glinting in the light from his lantern--pointed the naive soul to my blog's doorstep with a feeble outstretched finger. He took a few cautious steps forward, and when he turned back to thank her for her aid, she had vanished.

I need to change things up. I want this blog to be a productive enterprise, without turning it into a digital tissue into which my 128-bit crocodile tears would inevitably flow. life is hard, etc. I want to make this into a platform for the ideas that I would otherwise create and promptly allow to wither and die. this is poor form for a writer, and doubly so for a comedian (i consider myself to be both of these things to varying degrees that change as often as the socks on my feet). No, my better ideas deserve to be fed and nurtured, kept around and molded into something bigger and better than before.
with a little luck, i'll start writing jokes again before New Years
One idea I had today was a method of determining the "springboard" of my posts--the method by which i turn an idea into a few hundred (hopefully coherent and palatable) words: each blog post title will contain the word "is", "am", or "was"*. What goes on the left and right of that root word is up to me, my current mood/state, or whatever cool thing I just happened to find on the internet. My initial idea for this blog was to name is is/am/was, but earlier while in the car I considered using "Kress, please!" instead, and it stuck. I have some other interesting ideas going forward, but to quote the great Clay Davis:

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit

"Crawl, walk, then run"

*[i may, in time, incorporate the words "will be" into the mix, but for now, I'll maintain this trio]

I'll graciously bow out of this first post before it becomes too much. Thank you for reading this initial gibberish, and hopefully you'll find yourself coming back often to see what trinkets i've snatched from the LOLdragon's lair.

adieu.
-SK