Secret Still

My official vacation for the year starts tomorrow, so you will have to do without me for a while. Don’t sweat. I’ll be back before you know it, and the three of you will have more to stare at than the cold, boring bars of your cells. Just keep your head down and do your time while I’m out snorting blow from the various stripper crevices. I’ll send you a postcard with a picture of me and Lindsay Lohan doing the Lindy Hop on America’s grave. This vacation is mostly just a trip back home to see the progenitors and the shiftless layabouts that I hold as friends. You can’t go home again? That’s true, not after the fire I started before I left. I doubt there’s much left to go home to. Back to a triple digit pollen count, air like soup, and a pre-New Deal attitude towards race and sexual preference. Back to the land where Jesus is King with his wife Dairy Queen. Does Manifest Destiny work in reverse?

Did you wake up this morning with some birds singing and a nice blue sky? Did you sigh a big, relaxed sigh and slip out of bed like a contented little lamb? Good. I’m glad. But as of right now all of that is over. I’m going to tell you about Zeloot, and Zeloot is going to rip off your face and jam your skull bones full of blinding, colorful magic. You won’t even want to use your eyes after this. What paltry colors can the world offer after the searing, eye-raping neon of Zeloot? Nothing. You will kill birds with your bare hands out of spite. How dare they try to make the world calm down with their quiet little songs. The world is hard, fast, and bright, and it want’s to put its evil inside you. Zeloot has told you this. All hail Zeloot.

Zeloot

Dear Mom,

Hello from camp. I am having a good time. I meeted a boy name Pieratt. He is fun. He makes good pictures. He do not talk about himself much, but his pictures are so good. He let me look at his secret treasures. We are friends. I like swimming here. I do not like the tomato soup. I like the cookies you sended. Please send more.

Love,
Me

p.s. Here is Pieratt

The long awaited (at least by me) day has finally arrived! Hell yes I am using that exclamation point, because Firefox 3 is finally upon us. All Opera, Safari, and *shudder* IE users take notice: your browser are belong to us. You no longer need to suffer behind the working of a web browser that thinks pop-ups are candy. You can have a browser that integrates thousands of handy plug-ins created by its vast open source community. Get your shit together and download Firefox 3 today. Don’t sleep on this. If you download today you can help them try to set the world record for downloads in a single day. A great browser and a place in history. Your life will probably never mean more than that.

Firefox 3

I’m not gonna say a lot about Romanian artist Roman Tolici’s work, because it speaks for itself. I was drawn to his In Exitus works, because they’re visually arresting, and I do love a good skull. But the rest of his arsenal is equally good. It’s nice to see some classical painting again. I spend so much time looking at low brow and such that I forget how much traditional styles can do. Roman’s got some great composition and shows a damn strong mastery of his medium. Some of his stuff is a little more on the morbid side than I usually like, but it doesn’t seem to be in it for the horror value. I can appreciate that. I certainly can appreciate that.

Roman Tolici

I’m on a roll with the design posts it seems. Travis Stearns, the brain behind Mint Condition, gets to be the third in a row of killer designers I’ve mentioned. His work is more along the usual vein of illustratorial work that I feature, but the type and design are so fresh and so clean clean. He’s good with muted and bright colors, sketchy lines, hand-drawn fonts, and all the other designer tricks in and out of vogue. In other words, he’s got skills. I’d let him design me a tattoo and a wedding invitation. I don’t think there’s anything that he would come up with that I wouldn’t nod my head and grin about. For some reason it makes me think of A Tribe Called Quest. Idea: Travis Stearns makes an animated video for a Tribe song. Just put me down for a consulting credit, Travis.

I Am Mint Condition

Richmond, VA’s clothing design firm Ser-vice shook my eyes and my soul this morning. Who knew that I would actually like a printed t-shirt. For years I have worn white t-shirts almost exclusively, because they’re simple, and I don’t have to spend any time thinking about my clothes when I wake up. Yet even now, I sit here thinking about rocking the Ampersand Tee, or the one with the mountains on it. I can already feel my life getting more complex. Check out their stock and see how you’d like to redesign your chest. Sometimes I write things and they sound completely different than I though they would.

Ser-vice

Also a little more on the design tip is the portfolio of Bulgarian designer Kaloian Toshev. Although I’d like to talk about his illustrations, he has a solid portfolio in most of the design arenas that you should also wrap your peepers around. His illustration work is very vector-based, which usually makes me sigh or possibly throw something, but he’s got more subtlety than most. He layers in the shadows like most, but keeps a little messy linework in to keep things dynamic, and then spices it up with overlayed texture, and just good general chaos. Even the color combinations are a little savage. Really, what’s not to like?

Kaloian Toshev

I realize that I’ve been kind of slack on the design side of the content, and it probably falls into the same category as web design. I don’t mention a lot of it, because I’m really picky. I’m really picky, because I would expect better from myself (I doubt I could produce better most of the time, but I would expect better). Coming across the portfolio of Dan Sheffield (aka The Bad Lab) today I definitely didn’t think that I could do better. He’s got such a strong use of color and pattern. And his type is killer on top of that. Simple, direct, and visually intriguing imagery, coupled with wit and great color. I know there aren’t any formulas for perfection, but that’s at least the equation for damn fine work. I don’t really give out compliments higher than that.

The Bad Lab on Flickr

I stumbled across photographer Dulce Pinzón’s brilliant photography project, Superheroes, this morning, and it immediately grabbed me. Having moved to California in the last year or so, it was quite a change for me to see the large population of Mexican immigrants firsthand. Most of them hold down the hard jobs and the dirty jobs that need to be done. They remind me of my Dad, working 16 hour days in 130 degree temperatures with a broken foot so that I had clothes (yes, that actually happened). He did it for his family. Pinzón’s project documents the immigrant workers who are doing it for their families. She photographs them at their jobs dressed as various Superheroes, because that is exactly what they are. They push themselves to superhuman levels to help those they love. My favorite part is probably the little captions under each photo telling how much that person sends home to their family in Mexico. If I could ever get my Dad to wear anything other than LSU sweatshirts I would probably put him in a Hulk costume, and under the photo it would say: Dennis Martin, sends home everything he’s ever had.

Dulce Pinzón - Superheroes