Keeping busy, I’ve started posting interviews from my upcoming book on male genital modification. They’re all in pre-publication form — one of the reasons I’m posting them is that I’m dragging my feet on editing them, and I hope that having them public will (a) motivate me to work harder, and (b) generate helpful editing from people who read the interviews. So please, if this interests you, post your suggestions and corrections, from small typos on up to full overhauls.
Via my car site, I also met an interesting person — a designer of early kit cars (including a couple of my favorites) that sold about a thousand way-ahead-of-their-time electric cars in the seventies and eighties, until he was — he claims — shut down by FBI/Cointelpro… I think he’s definitely got a book in him! I think I’ll email him now and see if he’d like a ghostwriter.
My father (you know him here and elsewhere as “starbadger” — that’s him below from the paradise I grew up in), who taught me everything I know about working hard, is embarking on a new project as well. If you’d like to watch it unfold (and perhaps get involved), you can keep your eye on CASTLEHOM.com.
Still more to do on this page’s panel, but here it is in context. It still has to be re-lined and tinted, and I think a few more elements will be painted in as well… It’s amazing how poor the color reproduction of the point-and-shoot camera is. In real life there’s a lot more color depth*, which I assume my bigger camera will eventually capture more accurately.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
* Edit: I took a new picture that shows it a little better.
When I was seven or eight, my father edited the print magazine Videotext Journal, which was about what was essentially an early graphical precursor to the world wide web. I had drawn a Klingon Bird of Prey (a Star Trek spaceship) on one of our computers, and it ended up as an illustration in the magazine — becoming a “published artist” at that age is something I remember distinctly with pride, and I’m sure it was quite influential in my thinking as a child and thus my entire life.
I thought of that story because in this month’s Bizarre magazine (February 2009 — pick it up on newsstands now) there is a short article on me and my paintings (and thank you to Alix for promoting my book of body modification interviews), and contained in that article is a painting that Nefarious and I did together (Apocalypse Spiders), so she now shares the early thrill of being a published artist. Of course, she only got to see that single page of the magazine, but nonetheless, she was very happy to know that people all over the world have now seen our art.
Thanks again, Bizarre!
If you’re wondering why I’m posting on a Saturday afternoon, Nefarious is glued to the Wii right now… We went to trapeze class this morning and now she’s playing some of her old games, steadfastly refusing my suggestion that we go to the park and play!
Here are three two-page spreads from the kid’s book interpretation of the poem… These are still early stages of the paintings so they’ll surely change a bit before I’m done (most obviously, the Abyssinian made is currently white!). I’m going to do all the paintings and then start doing extra treatments to them.
There are tons of these videos online but these are some that stood out to me. The first one is a two-legged goat that looks like some sort of strange goat-chicken hybrid.
