This is how a logo gets made

Mmmmmm nothing like beating the crap out of vinyl on a Sunday morning. (I know, it felt a little sacrilege, but it makes for a great image.) What record is that you ask? That shall remain a mystery...

 

Holy Shetbags!

Check out the new fresh designs in the Punk Masters' shop! You go! Now! Aaaand free worldwide shipping - holy shet indeed!

Andre

Thanks to my friend Tracey I had the opportunity to meet Andre Agassi last night at a book signing (and thank you for the book too Trace!) I have to say he was an absolute gentleman and just a class act. I look forward to reading his autobiography, "Open". I've already read a bit and it is thoroughly engaging. Even for someone who has never been a big follower (such as myself), it doesn't matter as it is proving to be a great read and is extremely well written. Check it out!

Genius.

Always know what day of the week it is

Doing a little cross-promotion here, I wanted to take a moment (or paragraph, rather) and spotlight the new 2010 Duran Duran calendar. It's just been released for pre-order on the band's website via their merchandiser, Crewe Issue. I spent the months of September/October designing it and am particulalry happy with this one. It's a little different than the past ones I've designed in that it incorporates many more photos than ever before. I was so inspired by photographer Kristin Burns' photos she took of the band on their West Coast mini-tour this past summer, I couldn't just pick 12! Kristin has a great eye, and her photos, when seen together, always tell a story. I wanted to bring that vibe to the calendar and make more of a visual documentary of sorts - like a small photo book of their brief tour. I'm pleased with it, it's fun and goes a step further than the past calendars. Check it out!

Also, John's shirt on the cover in no way influenced my choice of cover shot. Not at all...

Tape Art

I'm a huge lover of 'street art' - graffiti, stenciling, etc... and I see a lot of it in LA. The energy, the DIY vibe, the clever pop cultural references (sometimes mixed with political), I love all that. But how about using tape as your medium? What?! I visited LA's Hammer Museum with a friend last week and came upon this installation by Swiss artist Nic Hess who created all of this amazing wall art out of tape - brightly colored masking tape, packing tape, duct tape.... and it sort of blew me away! He combined it with some stenciling too, but it was just so different and so creative. It took over the whole lobby entrance, and what was even cooler, the weekend before they had a bunch of kids work with Hess in covering the entire marble staircase (and railing!) with art made out of that brightly colored masking tape. It was extraordinary to see - and walk all over! (and funny enough, the floor reminded me a lot of Jean-Michel Basquiat, it had that child-like yet manic energy.)

Anyway, I've never heard of him before this, but I'm glad I discovered him. Should he ever exhibit in a museum in your town - go!

Before the floor and stairwell were covered in tape!

 

Packing tape gorilla on the ceiling corner

 

 

 

The kids cover the floor!

i love promo

My wonderful friend Lori Majewski has given Punk Masters a great shout out on her new web venture ThisGirl! Check it out: http://this-girl.tumblr.com/post/237078195/sexy-new-t-shirt-line-were-totally-obsessed

Leaving Las Vegas

Or, rather, not leaving Las Vegas as the case may be!

It actually started out lovely and quite simple. I was going to fly to Vegas for the night to meet my brother as he would be there for a trade show. He wanted me to do some website work for his business and we were going to meet about that and have a fun night out. We then decided to extend the invite to our parents, who enjoy a little trip there now and again. They have been going to Vegas for over 30 years, and we thoguht this trip would be good for them, get them out a little.

All good. We meet there on a Friday, eating, slot machines and the Vegas vibe ensues.... nothing by any means over the top I might add (my parents are 79 and 81!) My mom is quite lucky on the slots I have to say... me, not so much. What I'd like to know is however is, where does one's sense of time go when there?! I've been to Vegas many times and it always seems any sense of time (or reality for that matter) goes out the window! I guess that's the point!

Anyway, there is always some new buildings, hotels, etc going up every time I'm there, and I have to say as we were driven down the Strip to dinner, the coolest building by far caught my eye at a stoplight, so naturally I had to hang my head out the window to capture it. It's part of yet another new high end shopping complex, and the photo really doesn't do it justice, but the new Louis Vuitton store looked amazing, particularly with the evening light hitting the metal (and it had the LV logo embossed into the metal.. I love details like that!) It reminded me a lot of the Disney Concert Hall here in LA actually.

So yes, then an incredible dinner, and then my one club moment when my brother wants me to join him and two of his co-workers to a night of strippers and debauchery. My parents passed. No, seriously, he had an outside table reserved at Club Pure at Caesars, bottle service, VIP area, view of the Strip, seated right by the fire pit (it's cold at night!).. done deal. Now anyone who has been to Vegas knows, in all seriousness, the club scene is very cheesy! Can be fun, yes, but the cheese is there. Not particularly my thing normally, but hanging out with my brother in what was actually a beautiful setting outside, bottle of Patron, pineapple juice, plenty of water, it was very cool. We don't get to hang a lot being 2500 miles apart so it was great.

(me on the left, my brother, John, on the right, with his co-workers Giovanni and Jen)

Alright, back to the hotel 2am, not too bad, just plan to be up early for breakfast with mom and dad! And there's when it started. Sunday there was just something not quite right with my dad, he was pretty out of it actually. We were thinking it was more of a stomach virus perhaps, and just the travel taking a little toll. He was in bed all day and as time went on it just seemed he wasn't getting better. he continued to sleep and we decide to push their 7am flight back to 3pm Monday, thinking dad just needs a good night's sleep and a little time in the morning.

Monday morning, no better and he's even breathing a little harder now. OK, we call the house doctor up now. EMTs show up to the room, then paramedics. They feel he has fluid in his lungs and it would be in our best interest to have him taken in an ambulence over to the hospital asap. Uh, shit! Not expecting that! But you know (and this is not the first time something like this has happened.. though not in Vegas!!) in these situations I find that I just go into autopilot mode and stay calm and do what needs to be done (I think I get that from my mom as she is always calm.) So my mom goes off with dad in the ambulance (and let me just say how weird it is to see your dad being wheeled out in a stretcher to a waiting ambulance in a Vegas hotel, it's a weird surreal experience), and my brother and I talk to the hotel, extend the room, and cab it over to the hospital while beginning to rearrange flights.

If anyone's been in an emergency room, then you know they are not fun. Especially not when you end up spending the better part of a day in one. Finally about 4pm they want to admit my dad into the hospital overnight, possibly longer. Now, despite my dad wanting to leave right then and there, we knew the right thing to do, he was in no shape to fly. He has fluid in his lungs and is in what they term, 'congestive heart failure'. Yeah, scary. So he's admitted and we hope he's released the next day. haha! It became a surrender to the phrase "one day at a time". Each day drugs were administered, tests were taken, and still no go. It was an exercise in acceptance and patience.. and to be honest I didn't care how long we were there as long as my dad got better..... despite my dad wanting to leave every hour (and to be fair, I couldn't blame him, he just wanted to be home.) Finally on Thursday he was discharged. Change the flights for the 4th time, get the room for another night, we all breathe!

Looking back on it, it was quite a stressful week, but it's almost as if that hit me afterward. You do what is needed at the moment, stay calm, think about it later!

Now, the one running theme/joke we had the whole time had to do with a recently opened hotel in Vegas. It's called the Palazzo. I don't know why we didn't stay there, but we were asked by anyone who saw our name if we stayed there, if we own it (I hope they were joking), if we know them, etc.... Admittedly we did get a kick out of it.

CORRESPONDENCE/CORRESPONDENCIA

OK so a little late in the game here, unfortunately life got in the way, but I wanted to make mention of this exhibit many of you may already know about by artist Laureana Toledo. Titled CORRESPONDENCE/CORRESPONDENCIA, the exhibit is a multimedia study/commentary of sorts that Laureana ended up collaborating with John Taylor on.

A tale of two cities, Birmingham, England and Mexico City, an abstract study on how as a global community we really aren't all that different from each other. The exhibit uses film (shot by Laureana in Birmingham and John in Mexico City) as well as sound, conversations between John and Laureana as well as, check this, a loop of just John's bass recorded from a Duran Duran show this past summer. Interesting visual and sonic elements at play.

Another part to it was a newspaper, PROXIMO, that I was asked to create. This was a fun project for me as I had free reign in a way of what I could do. I used the conversation between Laureana and John in the film to comprise the text of the paper, but I took it all out of order and abstrated it a bit. I pulled lines that stood out to me and used them as main headlines, thus creating little 'articles' out of a conversation. I then pulled still images from the film that, to me, fit with the text and added some visual sense and excitement. A completely abstract excercise really, John and Laureana told me to just run with what I felt from it!

So the paper is 8 pages, with one side printed in English, then you flip it over and the other side is in Spanish... printed on the coolest, vintage-looking peachy-pink newsprint paper, which I love. Both sides meet in the middle with a 'centerfold' image of two cities colliding. And it is free to take for those who attend.

Now unfortunately this is only going on for a few more days until November 8th at the Eastside Projects gallery in Birmingham, but for those in the area there is still time to check it out! For the rest of us, perhaps this exhibit will make its way to another gallery in another city one day as well.

For more info: http://www.eastsideprojects.org/

new veg

So since I mentioned it in the interview, I probably should just share the beauty that is 'signage fail'. By the way I have noticed at this particular grocery store it now does indeed read ASPARAGUS.

First Post!

What better way to start my blog than with someone else's?! I'm actually posting a link to John Taylor's blog on duranduran.com, which really took the form of an interview he did with me. You might have already seen it, but I'm putting it here anyway!

This past summer as I was working on launching my business, John said that he would interview me to post up on his blog on the DD site, which I thought was really nice of him to suggest. The last time the two of us did any kind of interview together was many years back for John's website, trusttheprocess.com (TTP).

I think we were both looking forward to it as we usually have a lot of fun and laughs doing it. So we sat down a couple of weeks ago, armed with a mug of coffee each, and off we went. It was indeed fun. John also suggested I add a few photographs to go along with some of the things we talked about, you know, add some flava! The hardest part was getting photos of projects I did when I was young.

The holy grail (for me at least) was finding a photo of the clay people I made. There still must be evidence of this! Now, my parents live 2500 miles away in Ohio and they have everything. My mom has thousands of family photos stored in shoe boxes - a dozen shoe boxes. Really that would be cruel and unusual punishment to make her go through all 12 over a weekend... not even knowing if a photo actually even existed. Like Sasquatch. Well, after a few phone calls back and forth, my mom informs me that she found not a photo, but the actual clay people! Holy crap, these things are like 30 years old! She had lovingly packed them away in a box wrapped in tissue paper. There were some casualties of course over the years, heads and various appendages missing on some, odd shaped torsos on others, but there were about 8 or so that held up. I need to see them next time I am back home, I thought they were long gone. For some reason I have such a vivid childhood memory of when I created those little people, I must hold them in my hands!

Anyway, onto the blog..... interview:
http://www.duranduran.com/wordpress/?p=16145