Road to Perdition

August 5, 2010 //
0

Road to Perdition [sketch]Every so often when I’m watch­ing a movie I get the urge to sketch, to cap­ture that par­tic­u­lar moment in the film.

As I was watch­ing Road to Perdi­tion the other night I quickly grabbed a note­book, one usu­ally reserved for actual note tak­ing and sketched this from one of the many piv­otal scenes in the movie, this one show­ing the main char­ac­ter and his son trav­el­ing to Chicago.

I hope to do more of these, in this style, over time and shar­ing them and hope­fully next time I’ll use higher qual­ity mate­ri­als, but that said I feel as though some of the charm is attrib­uted to the lo-fi feel of it.

Rdio

July 16, 2010 //
1

Music gives a soul to the uni­verse, wings to the mind, flight to the imag­i­na­tion, and life to everything.

—Plato

Music has played a part in how I per­ceive the world around me, whether that be when I’m work­ing, spend­ing time with my kids, dri­ving my car, there’s never a moment where I’m not lis­ten­ing to the likes of Jimmy Eat World, Cold­play, Michael Jack­son (a favorite of mine for sev­eral years) and other groups that have con­tributed to my per­sonal soundtrack.

Years ago when I used Nap­ster for the first time I was in awe that I could type in the name of any song, for the most part and just down­load it. This seemed mag­i­cal to me, the notion that I could instantly lis­ten to any track I was think­ing of, in that moment, made me real­ize how use­ful the Inter­net had become.

After Nap­ster, I tried and still use a vari­ety of music dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vices like iTunes, Groove­shark and Pan­dora, the lat­ter of the three is a music rec­om­men­da­tion ser­vice that plays sim­i­lar music based on your inter­ests, be that a band, genre or spe­cific artist.

Over the years I’ve real­ized that music is not a solo expe­ri­ence, rather it’s some­thing that you can share with others.

Rdio, a new music/social ser­vice, allows me to lis­ten to what­ever I feel like and add tracks and albums to my own per­sonal col­lec­tion but more impor­tantly it gives me the oppor­tu­nity to share my tastes and pref­er­ences with friends.

The design of the online appli­ca­tion is stun­ning with an inter­face that show­cases the music and com­mu­nity fea­tures. You just search for a song, artist or album (much like Nap­ster and other P2P ser­vices, except this is legal) and queue it up and if you want, add it to your collection.

Those who you fol­low can see what you’re lis­ten­ing to, what you’ve added and can sub­scribe to playlists you can cre­ate. It’s all very sim­ple and intu­itive to use.

It’s changed the way I lis­ten to and con­sume music and as a result I’ve found that I’m buy­ing less music from iTunes or Amazon.

For $4.99 you can listen/stream your col­lec­tion online and for a few bucks more ($9.99) you can stream music online and to hand­held devices.

It’s closed beta right now, but you can still sent them your email address for an invite to the service.

I really heart Rdio. You can find me here.

The Road Not Taken

January 13, 2010 //
4

I have a ten­dency to trans­verse my mem­ory logs — as deep and vast as they are — for spe­cific moments that led me to where I am now.

If I were a super­hero this would be my great­est weak­ness; too much look­ing back, not enough look­ing for­ward. I sup­pose it has to do with the way I’ve engi­neered myself.

Explor­ing who it is that I was and con­tinue to be, as a father, hus­band and artist com­forts the per­son that I’ve become.

Just as there is no secret sauce to suc­cess, there too is no algo­rithm to know­ing what choice we made (or will make) is the right one. Instead we lean on our past and entrust our­selves to influ­ence future deci­sions and hope the best for the penul­ti­mate outcome.

Robert Frost, four-time Pulitzer Prize win­ning Amer­i­can poet, put it best in his poem,

The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yel­low wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one trav­eler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And hav­ing per­haps the bet­ter claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the pass­ing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morn­ing equally lay
In leaves no step had trod­den black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet know­ing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Some­where ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less trav­eled by,
And that has made all the difference

We’ve all stood before the fork in the road of our choices. Just as the per­son Frost describes above we chose one path over another and promise our­selves that if we ever face a sim­i­lar set of choices again, we might con­sider the other path.

Yet, it is highly unlikely we will face the same sit­u­a­tion, so we accept that what­ever we did may or may not have had an out­come we were proud of and we move on.

I can’t say that every deci­sion I’ve made has been the right one, in fact I’d be liv­ing in a delu­sional world if I believed that were true.

How­ever, I know for a fact that many of them, right or wrong, shaped the per­son I am today and rec­og­niz­ing the jour­ney to that fork in the road is prob­a­bly just as impor­tant as the deci­sion itself.

The dif­fi­culty for me is fig­ur­ing out why I decided to take one path over another which ends up being an exer­cise fueled with curios­ity and some­times lends itself to insanity.

Creative Redemption

January 6, 2010 //
1

There are times when a design con­cept of mine fails to boil over in awe­some­ness and at that point I throw a sheet over it, shove it in a cor­ner next to the mutated Chihuahua-Goat™ and ask myself why I even attempted it.

It hap­pens so often, in fact, that I begin to doubt my instincts as a designer. It bog­gles the mind that a Design­ers Anony­mous group doesn’t exist for this very rea­son, but I digress.

This way of think­ing is ludi­crous because every­thing we cre­ate is vital to the design process, no mat­ter the context.

For exam­ple: That movie poster that you spent sev­eral hours on, the one that was even­tu­ally canned because the hero’s (or heroin’s) face ended up being badly con­torted at a spe­cific view­ing angle would prob­a­bly seem like a failed cre­ation. You might even be tempted to trash it from your hard drive, never to speak of it again.

But guess what? Hor­ri­bly man­gled facial crufties aside, you might end up recy­cling the type­face or that speck­led tex­ture for a future poster or project.

Make it a habit, if you haven’t already, to file away your delight­ful cre­ations for future use and avoid curs­ing your design work with voodoo.

It just never works, I mean what am I sup­posed to do with this Chihuahua-Goat™?

Just remem­ber the three R’s: Redeem, Reuse and Rejoice.

Project 52

December 29, 2009 //
3

It’s been extremely quiet here, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been locked away in some room carv­ing odd sym­bols into the walls.

Actu­ally, I’ve been tool­ing away at many things, one of which involves this very site, but that I can’t speak of quite yet. I’ll just say the redesign is under­way and will mark the return of the crest. For older read­ers you know exactly what I mean, but for those who’ve only stopped by every once in a while the crest was once part of the brand of this site.

Beyond that I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in Project 52 this year. What’s that?

Project52 is a per­sonal chal­lenge geared toward get­ting fresh con­tent on your web­site. The goal is to write at least 1 new arti­cle per week for 1 year.

I’m chal­leng­ing myself to a goal: to write some­thing new once or more per week for one year start­ing Jan­u­ary 1st, 2010. It doesn’t seem like a lofty goal really, not at all actu­ally. It just means I have to com­mit to some­thing that I’ve long neglected and some­where along the line it might (I hope!) recharge the fiz­zled neon sign that is this “blog” or site, or what­ever you want to call it. Call it “Fresh Fish Mar­ket” for all I care, which inci­den­tally is the name of my wire­less network.

There you have it. At least one new post a week for just a year and if I can adhere to that rule I think the prize is an all-paid expense trip to Tahiti.

One can dream such a dream, right?

One day at a time

November 20, 2009 //
2

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time. — Abra­ham Lincoln

Ever have one of those days where the future seems hazy, but you’re cer­tain it’ll become clearer as you move through it all?

Today was that day.

As blessed as I am (mostly due to a sup­port list that has too many names to men­tion — okay, one being my wife), I still pon­der the journey.

Step­ping stones…

District 9 (review)

August 31, 2009 //
1

District 9

There’s a scene in Dis­trict 9 when the main char­ac­ter, after endur­ing a lot of pain and humil­i­a­tion, has to make the choice of either run­ning into bat­tle guns ablaze or retreat. He chooses the lat­ter know­ing full well that his actions are dri­ven by fear and selfishness.

Dis­trict 9 or “D9” is many things all rolled up into a hard to describe pack­age. Among them it’s a sci-fi adven­ture with all the ele­ments you’d expect like blaster guns and an enor­mous space­ship. It’s also an unre­lent­ing social com­men­tary and an action-packed romp that refuses to let down its guard.

The effects and cin­e­matog­ra­phy com­pli­ment each other quite well and at times it’s hard to dis­tin­guish between the two. That said, they are not of the slick vari­ety that other films con­vey, but the grimy tex­ture is beau­ti­ful and per­fect for the por­trayal of a enslaved race of aliens liv­ing in South African slums.

It’s an unfor­giv­ing, rav­ished and self­ish envi­ron­ment, leav­ing barely any room for sur­vival. It’s a film that is best expe­ri­enced with­out dig­ging for holes in the plot (of which they are a few) or mak­ing assump­tions deal­ing with the char­ac­ter por­trayal or progression.

I enjoyed it because it didn’t reveal too much of itself and yet what it did expose was raw (human and alien) emo­tion, flaws in the human fab­ric and a detached feel­ing of human­ity, or at least I felt detached at times.

Sketches

July 20, 2009 //
5

Even though my kids are aware that their Dad is an artist, it’s not often I get requests from them. That might sound sur­pris­ing, but I prob­a­bly don’t sketch as much as I should. Most of my art­work is gen­er­ated on the com­puter and they just assume the zeros and bytes do most of the work.

Recently, my three-year-old son Quinn asked me to draw Beast from Beauty and the Beast. He handed me a Cray­ola Twistable crayon and two sheets of copy paper and stood by my side wait­ing for the results. He also reminded me that he wanted it deliv­ered pretty quickly, as if he had a pitch meet­ing to attend or something.

Since then I’ve been doing some sketches of other char­ac­ters you might rec­og­nize, the idea being that these are quick, dirty and recognizable.

The Sketches

The Beast [Flickr]

Mate­ri­als: A blue Cray­ola Twistable, reg­u­lar copy paper.

Sarah [Flickr]

Donald Duck [sketch]

Old Owl [Flickr]

Mate­ri­als: Pris­ma­color col­ored pen­cil, reg­u­lar copy paper. Source: Don Bluth Animation

A rag-tag band led by the infamous Captain EO

July 9, 2009 //
0

I watched Cap­tain EO (not sure what the EO means) with my kids (the toe-head twins) and it occurred to me that I had never showed it to them until now.

Their favorite line was one uttered by The Supreme Leader:

You infect my world with your pres­ence! Turn the oth­ers into… trashcans!

Even though Cap­tain EO was a favorite from my child­hood, hav­ing seen it for the first time in the late 80s/early 90s, it took the pass­ing of Michael Jack­son and a flood of nos­tal­gia to con­vince me to do so. What a shame.

We also watched Moonwalker’s Smooth Crim­i­nal sequence, but that wasn’t nearly as cool to them. I tried to explain that when I was a kid (early 80s), Michael Jack­son was some­thing spe­cial and even after all these years he’s still con­sid­ered a true tal­ent. What I didn’t go into was all the media hype, spec­u­la­tion, accu­sa­tions, strange behav­ior or gig­gly inter­views because none of that mat­tered to me and some­day they can get the scoop on all of that if they really want to.

Michael’s mes­sage to the world was sim­ple: be inspired and imag­i­na­tive, lov­ing, cre­ative and good.

It’s some­thing we all can aspire to be and for that I thank “MJ” for his influence.

Howard the Duck

July 8, 2009 //
3

Howard the DuckGeorge Lucas has cre­ated some won­der­ful movies and is unde­ni­ably a vision­ary film­maker, story-teller and influ­ence in the film indus­try. Recently, evi­dence of this has sur­faced in the form of a PDF out­lin­ing the “Raiders” story con­fer­ence.

He’s also respon­si­ble for some real stinkers. Movie stink that could quickly foul a room full of under­de­vel­oped daisies and sel­dom come up in con­ver­sa­tion for fear of one being exiled or worse, thrown to a bunch of rav­en­ous movie crit­ics. Now I’m begin­ning to feel nos­tal­gic for the car­toon, The Critic, but anyways…

Howard the Duck is per­haps the worst movie on George’s resume (yes, fouler than even Clone Wars), failed mis­er­ably at the box office and yet it retains a charm all its own. There are even days when the movie strangely hov­ers around in my thoughts from time to time.

If this were VH1’s Behind the Music, this is the part when the guy would say.. “And now, the story behind the story.”

It all started with some comics

From Wikipedia:

[Howard the Duck] first appeared in Adven­ture into Fear #19 (Dec. 1973) and sev­eral sub­se­quent series have chron­i­cled the mis­ad­ven­tures of the ill-tempered, anthro­po­mor­phic, “funny ani­mal” trapped on human-dominated Earth. Howard’s adven­tures are gen­er­ally social satires, and also often par­o­dies of genre fic­tion with a meta-fictional aware­ness of the medium. [Wikipedia]

If you were to pick up a Howard comic dur­ing this time you’d notice very lit­tle dif­fer­ence between him and Don­ald Duck. This was inten­tional on the part of its cre­ators but for obvi­ous rea­sons wasn’t car­ried over in the movie.

Quack, Quack!

The movie adap­ta­tion, released in 1986, retained some of the traits from the comic in the form of its star, Howard, who was still ill-tempered and anthro­po­mor­phic. Instead of doing an ani­mated fea­ture, which would’ve been an ideal pre­sen­ta­tion, the film was instead live-action and the duck would be part ani­ma­tronic pup­pet, part diminu­tive actor.

It starred a very young Lea Thomp­son and Tim Rob­bins. Tim Rob­bins, up until this point (with Top Gun’s release loom­ing) had been known for bit roles in TV and film. Lea Thomp­son was (and will prob­a­bly always be) known as the Marty McFly’s mother Lor­raine in Back to the Future.

Together, they were sup­port­ing play­ers to their feath­ered star and despite the sub par script and kooky spe­cial effects, man­aged to give some­what con­vinc­ing per­for­mances. How­ever, there is some­thing to be said about the human/duck rela­tion­ship that is, to this day, uncom­fort­able to watch. I don’t think I was ever fully up to speed on the “birds, ducks and bees.”, but I digress.

Above all us, Howard the Duck, like The Dark Crys­tal, was a child­hood favorite of mine because it was some­thing I enjoyed watch­ing with my family.

It was a fan­tas­tic, awful, bewil­der­ing and grossly under­rated cult classic.

The Trailer

Addi­tional Reading:

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