It's Robi's birthday! Raise a glass of whatever seems most appropriate in a toast. Robi, I know you are shaking up the afterlife! I miss you badly and wish you the best!

Then so is life the perfect companion to coffee.

I passed by Lorenzo today on my drive to the office. Lorenzo was a fellow denizen of the Onyx Cafe, and I had just called him to let him know about our old boss, John Leech's
untimely passage into the Great Beyond. I told him that I had talked to John periodically at Kaldi, and there Lorenzo was, driving by Kaldi thinking about going inside. I surprised him and he re-parked his car. We shared a cup and some laughs.

It will be weird to not run into John here again. He will be missed. The man practically invented the Coffeehouse, at least in LA.

Actual weather in Los Angeles is a rare and magical event, and right now out the window is visible the most splish-splashy grey phantasmagoria that an Angeleno could hope for shy of another El Nino.

It pours off of rooftops and rainslicks the oil from the roadways. Tee-shirted hipsters are forced to wear coats or stay indoors. The babies! It's called weather, and I say we may as well enjoy it while we got it.







As much as I may be tempted to explain where all I have been, and what all I've been up to in my absence from these darkened digital corridors, perhaps its safer not to. I have been on an unpleasant journey of self-discovery, plumbing the depths of my darker psychic realms the likes of which even Steve Ditko's Doctor Strange would cringe at the mere imagining of. I'm coming back...

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Ramadan and a cheerful whatever all else you good people may celebrate!

Joy!! Love!!

To 2009...and beyond!!

Your pal,

Hardman

This is by way of taproots (andarianadii and from from xianrex...how memes go I suppose)

"take a picture of yourself right now.
don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
post that picture with NO editing.
post these instructions with your picture."




Yeesh. One hour of sleep last night...can you tell?

do it.

So I'm in the unemployment office in Glendale awaiting my interview, when this gentleman I shall call Patrick strikes up a conversation with me. He's been out of work for just a month. He used to work in radio and is now unemployed. He used to live in Nashville. He tells me that he thinks what ruined country music is the perception by marketers and ad execs that only women buy country music, or that only women buy the products advertised on country music stations, meant that the records execs of Nashville created a market of soft-pop middle of the road "country". I tell him my theory is that country music became married to the whole idea of "God and Country", which meant that all the good songs about hard drinking, divorce, infidelity, and jail time went right out the window unless they could make it known that they were kidding or unless it had some moral at the end of the story. All contemporary country sounds like a truck commercial.

I told him that I went to school with Roger Miller's son (who now live and works in Nashville), and we both burst into the first verse of "King of the Road" together. I told him I thought there was still some good country out there and that none of it came out of Nashville.

He complained to me about how (he was an older chap) when he was a kid there was top 40 music which would offer a wide spectrum of rock, pop, motown, country etc. with no distinction among them...that because of the fracturing of the market into specific genres, with targeted advertising for specific groups that radio has died.

I suggest to Patrick that this is true, but then pointed out that for the adventurous there is always college radio with no play lists and no commercials. I then added that now with the proliferation of music on the internet and cable radio that there is really no end to the diversity in music...it's just not found on the radio. It may be harder for the artist to make a living but for the avid consumer of music times have never been more interesting or exciting.

He worked for Clearchannel, he tells me. He was in their talk radio division.

He next tells me that he helped launch the career of Rush Limbaugh.

He remembered, the guys saying there's this new guy that'll have his talk radio show and you may think he's crazy, but just give him a chance. Hear what he has to say, he's kind of interesting. "Oh, really". I say. He told me that the first month, maybe the first two months there were suddenly hundreds of angry phone calls of people saying, "Who is this jerk? Get this nut off the air", and then it got quiet. Then all the positive phone calls started coming in, and all these people going "he's got a point, there". Patrick said, "I watched him blow up all of a sudden, overnight this guy became huge."

He seemed so proud. All I could think to say was, "I wish that had never happened."

"Just think", he said, "Rush opened the door, paved the way for guys like Sean Hannity. It became a totally different ballgame than your grandpa's talk radio of reading the weather and big band music."

"I really wish that had never happened," was again all that I could think to say. I wish I could have been clever or quick or even a little sarcastic but I couldn't. How many times I wished I could just erase the last eight years, and here this guy, like me, was in the unemployment office filling out his paperwork... waiting his turn. I got called away then for my appointment then but it left me weirded out.

Tonight I listened to Barack Obama's speech on the radio. It was moving and inspiring, and a wonderfully odd counterpoint to the strange encounter with the ex-Clearchannel guy, who sold his soul to the machine and is now himself out of work. Obama talked about the unemployed and I thought of how the guy who helped launch Rush Limbaugh is out of a job, and I really felt bad for him. I listened to Obama and was really moved that perhaps the tide has turned. I can see the old ways fading away. I heard for the first time in my life, the Democratic party actually unite around something... anything, and it was kind of amazing. History is happening, regardless of the outcome. It's never happened like this before. It is happening right now. I heard it.

This is from when Marvel unveiled the original Iron Man armor for the movie at last summers Comic Con.

...and as if this wasn't good enough....Stan Lee was there too!





It's hard to describe. I was excited enough to get to take pictures of the armor (they kept it sealed in a crate labeled Stark Industries the rest of the time.) but I completely freaked out when I suddenly Stan was standing two feet in front of me...I was eleven years old all over again.




Yeah, that's me, the Ditko-defending Stan-basher yelling "We love you Stan!", and you know what? I do!

I just can't stop. This one is such a weird one...an odd kind of prophecy given what became of my financial status and the mayhem that ensued about two years ago. (THAT's no fun! ) (It's better now.)

I thought this was going to be a song for one of the rock bands I used to work with, but nothing ever became of it...until now! This was kind of how I tried to write in those days, with a lot of internal rhymes. It rarely works 'cause you have to really start forcing the issue to make it hang together or else just it starts getting kind of barouque.

This one is a fun one! Think of this kundalini wiggltry as a phallic "keep on truckin' style" dance of The Fool with a Snake as a stand-in for the Dog and no visible cliff (I know it's there, it's just ahead. I remember well falling off of it...it's merely off-panel, just to the right).

Drugs may have been involved with the creation of this sketch but perhaps not, I don't exactly remember. It was a long time ago, after all. Need I mention that this was an artifact from the package recently received from my year living in Little Five Points in Alanta, circa 1990? I didn't think so...

This is one of my favorites from the Out of the Past package. I'm 23 here. This picture was taken at the apartment building I lived in at Little Five Points in Atlanta, by my downstairs neighbor, Dave. He had the TV and the girl and I would head downstairs to view the 2nd Season of Twin Peaks as it was originally being broadcast.

This photo pretty accurately summarizes my state of mind for most of that time period.

Another trip in the time machine. This one seems appropriate, for the post-Valentines Day love hangovers that many of you may be suffering from.

This, like the image from Yesterday's Post, is from 1990-1991. It seems to have been taped to a wall for awhile. It's funny in a way but kind of sad too. A more accurate title may have been "First Kiss, Second Thoughts". That guy looks nervous!

Happy Valentines Day to everyone, everywhere!




The image I greet you with this Valentines Day is among the drawings and artifiacts that came to me from 16 years ago, sent in a package from a girl I lived with behind the Zesto's in Little Five Points in Atlanta, GA.

The original is a little larger than a postage stamp, drawn in faint blue ballpoint.

Much love to you all!

Kisses!

Hardman

Hardman, here...finishing up the last drawing for a rather perverse script that I have been illustrating for a client. The story features Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Groucho Marx and more! It's been a fun job.

What else is up with me? This week saw a quick trip to San Diego where I was recruiting students from SDSU, as well as lovely drive in a night lit with a gorgeous full moon.

I sold a signed print of my art last night and now only 15 remain of the uncut unfolded Last Supper Prints...if I sell them all Santa Claus is going o come and see my baby!

So it seems not terribly long ago that I penned my first Live Journal entry as I was preparing to attend the International Comic Con in San Diego...tomorrow will make it four years ago since my very first entry. This year, Comic Con ended yesterday.

I did not attend this go 'round (or last year either for that matter), as I am busy trying to find better paying work (as a day job) for myself and I couldn't really justify the expense in light of my staggering debt. (crap.)

In other news...I received a call from Jonathan Boyce, whom I met three years ago in Atlanta at the old Innovox Cafe when I was back in hotlanta recruiting for AFI. He is visiting his family in Atlanta after having been in Miami. The film he wrote and produced, SHARDS won the HBO Short Film Award ($20,000 plus a license to air the film on HBO) from Film Life's 9th Annual American Black Film Festival (ABFF) in South Beach, Miami, July 13-17. He was very proud, and I was thrilled that I was among the people he called to tell. SHARDS is a great film and the whole team has every right to be thrilled.

Last night I saw the Sally Potter film, YES. This complex and rich post-9/11 film of love and sex and race has a script entirley written in Iambic pentameter, which sounds excruciating but is fact so beautiful it made me tear up. This and the Miranda July film, YOU ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW are two of the most interesting films I have seen all year. See them if they come your way or rent them when they hit DVD.

Lastly, it's my Mom's birthday! I called her and sent some love her way in the mail.

...and I find that I am missing fair France. Carl and I here at work decided it would be a good idea to call Myriam, our french colleague, and wish her a happy Bastille Day. We asked if there were any little french songs that could be sung in celebration, and we also offered her some angel food cake, so she would not think that we were out right teasing her. Soon she is in our office passing out copies of La Marsillaise - Paroles en Francais, as well as La Marseillaise - with English lyrics and distributing rounds of kisses.

I knew the tune, but simply had no idea about how violent and bloody the words are:

"Arise children of the fatherland
The day of glory has arrived
Against us tyranny's
Bloody Standard is raised
Listen to the sound in the fields
The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst to cut the throats of your sons and consorts

To arms citizens Form your battalions
March, March
Let impure blood water our furrows

..."

So let's in celebration all of us rise up to tear down the prisons and chop off the heads of our oppressors... or at the very least light a couple a bottle rockets and roman candles in honor of our French brothers and sisters who stood beside us as we fought for our freedom as we stood beside them when they fought for theirs (those who were not Nazi sypathizers anyhow)

...and who had the good sense to try to tell us that invading Iraq was maybe not such a good idea after all.

Vive Le France!

...and now he's gone. Will Eisber has passed away.

I did have the pleasure of meeting Will Eisner . At a ComicCon in San Diego two years ago I got to sit in on a panel discussion with Michael Chabon (who based The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay on Eisner's recollections of the early days of the comic book industry), as well as another panel that dealt with the future of the graphic novel.

I spoke with him and I shook his hand. He had kind eyes and a gentle determination. His brilliance at 87 shone more brightly than anyone else half his age, and he will be missed. The world will never have another quite like him.

( Read more... )

Maggie's screening was a success.

There was good food, wine that was almost all consumed and an excited throng that spilled into the Formosa Cafe afterwards. Jenn Beast was on hand (lead vocalist for the song that Mark Peterson authored) down from San Francisco.

For two of the screenings there was a fascinating Q&A following. The next step will be a continued quest for funding of the remaining films in the series.

KODAK has offered Maggie more free film for Chapters 2 & 3, as they were quite pleased with the results thus far.

I have this sensation that television has greatly changed since I stopped watching it, sometime around 1994 or so. The late eighties and early nineties had a very educated populace on its hands and advertising was very self-aware. "Now WE know you know better to fall for this and we respect that, but we are telling you to buy it anyway because you are so cool you might..." Overtly subliminal, it tended to acknowledge the dirty tricks it was playing on you and was cloyingly ironic about about it's relationship to the viewer/consumer. In the late '90'... in all the magazines..."Irony is dead", they all started to say, "sincerity" is the new black...

People ARE more sincere about their beliefs and convictions and now ...since 9/11...incredibly and devisively so.

Somewhere along the way shortly after the threat of the writers guild strikes what followed was the explosion of unscripted tv. The gladiatorial ultimate humiliation of anyone willing to participate. The advertising that has come to accompany it that I have seen (from my limited exposure to TV) has all the subtlety of a bludgeon to a forehead and is executed with a spirit of meanness and vitriol. TV (in the half hour segments I have been exposed to here and there) presents human beings as teeth-baring monkeys shrieking for dominance on this collossal dirt-heap commanding the viewer/consumer to do their bidding. Or else.

Did you know that 50- 55% of all broadcast news isn't really "news" at all? These are news-like pubic relations "informational" peices that are really either advertising or editorializing for their corporate investors. All of these pieces are assembled by former journalists who work for two major madison avenue PR firms that represent top Fortune 500 companies...as news. How often have you seen stories on new miracle drug breakthrough stories on the news?

I had this dream last night that was terrifying beyond comprehension, and I woke feeling that societal trends are moving the world in this direction. A sense of the apocalypse that grows out of Christian versus everyone else and turns into a free-for-all of destruction unabated on a global scale

In my dream the whole world had deteriorated from a groovy "everybody do your own thing" into planet-wide hostility reality-television style free-for-all. There were those who fought for the side of "good" and there were those who fought for power and control. One character in my dream described the situation like this "everybody knowingly or not, whichever side they're fighting for is fighting for the ultimate extinction of life on the planet. You can have a lot more fun with it if you know that's what you're really doing." This segued into an overhead view of hordes of people in the street in a crush type of mob, literally smearing the bodies of the people to the side against the sides of the building, and grinding them underfoot, into paste. There were warriors who devised weapons fashioned from the ridiculous...like toilet plunger man, who with his arsenal of toilet plungers would harpoon his victims killing them if speared and if they could instead catch them they would be showered with rose petals and urged to passionately kiss the nearest person in arms reach before getting killed by someone else right behind them.

Horrifying dreams, no?

I blame the so-called Christian Right for how bad things are in danger of becoming, and the complacent and lazy misinformed wrong-headed voter for voting on the basis of what they see on FOX News. Hell, half of my family falls in this category.

Wake me up...before we go, go.

Bitter Weather: Prologue screens tomorrow at the Kodak screening room.

That's actually TODAY, November 18 in Los Angeles
Eastman Kodak Screening Room
6700 Santa Monica Blvd
Hollywood, CA 90038

cross street: Las Palmas
two blocks east of Highland

Screening Times: 7:30, 8:15 and 9:00.

Very special thanks to Paul for helping Maggie with the very lovely website.

A very busy week and then a fun weekend is now behind me.

I had a storyboarding job (quick turnaround...I got the script an shotlist for it on Monday and they started shooting on Saturday), and despite the immense lack of sleep...it was a lot of fun. The story is a caper/heist story that all goes awry....kind of like Mission Impossible meets The Usual Suspects, but with a twist. The twist being that all the gangsters are Muppets. Gonzo, Animal, Kermit and Grover are stealing Ernie's rubber ducky. Mayhem and bloodshed ensue. It should be really funny,lord knows my drawings were.

Saturday I was supposed to drive to Palm Springs to visit with my old friend Mark and Heather (and Warren and Sam). It was raining like a motherfucker plus I had only gone to sleep at 11 am that morning so I didn't do it. Maggie and I made love to Jimi Hendrix as the rain fell and it was sooooo yummy.

I did do the drive the next day and we had a blast. Mark was in Palm Springs to exhibit his newest batch of work. He works in torn paper/collage (Affiches Laceres). His work appears from a distance to be a painting, but upon closer viewing each brush stroke consists of tiny shreds of paper from various peices of junk mail and other found printed material all meticulously glue unto a surface, not enhanced in any way by drawing or painting. These recent works include pin-up girls, cowboys and commissioned portraits. This work has transcended beyond collage into something very ethereal and impressionistic laced with words and phrases woven into the image like "pharaohs of the sun", "complete Thanksgiving dinner-$1.47" ,"pay attention"," welcome to the family", "choose 5 books for $1" ,"take off your..." all of it worked into the image so that you read it like poetry.

Mark (or Uncle Walt) was my old studio partner at art school. We started the program together, worked at the graphics lab together, did drugs together, collaborated on work,graduated together and I even crashed on his couch for a month when I returned to LA until I found my own place. He lives in Tacoma WA these days so it was quite cool to see him and the gang again. Then I had to drive home in the rain.

I am really happy, really turned on to make more work and get it to where I can print and sell it. I want to finish issue three (!) and then I'm gonna just go for it. My target date is the beginning of 2005.