Thursday, June 29, 2006

Animated Puppets


A few years ago, Emily Glaeser helped me photograph a bunch of my puppets, many with various states...open mouth, closed mouth, flat. And I'm finally getting around to doing something with them. I tried posting animated gifs, but Blogger doesn't support them. Maybe I'll slowly get around to posting them on Savage Monsters or davesavage.net. (Not sure why the pics are looking kinda blotchy. Click on them to see a bigger better pic.)

Wasting Time





I'm not sure who wastes more time, employers or employees. Looking back, at least I've been productive while I'm wasting time. At least some of the time. I probably wasn't too productive when I snuck out of work to go to the movies. But I did that only once. Maybe twice.

Street Art Blows


Over the past 10 years or so, I've been casually documenting graffiti and street art, purely for my own enjoyment. The past 5 or 6 years have shown an explosion of "street art." Mostly photocopied images wheat pasted onto walls and lots of stickering. It was exciting at first, but now there seems to be a glut of it. So much of it seems repetitive and derivitive. A few weeks ago, I was photographing at the corner of Spring and Elizabeth in NYC, one of my favorite spots, when I saw this sticker. I think they're right, it's time for something new. It'll be exciting to see what's next.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Meeting Notes


For the most, I'd say that meetings are a waste of time. Except that it gives me time to doodle, which I highly enjoy. Both of these are from approximately 2 years ago. Not sure what either meeting was about. I'd like to say the one that says "conflict" was the meeting about "conflict resolution," but I found those "notes" later on the same legal pad. This must've been from the meeting where we were told that there would be a meeting about "conflict resolution."

Monday, June 26, 2006

Hula Girl


If I do go back to sleep, I hope I dream about hula girls in sushi grass skirts. I looked at sushi at the grocery store tonight and it looked pretty bad. Seafood in the midwest is usually not a very good idea. Hula girls are always good, though.

TV Voodoo

I slept fine while I was trying to watch TV; now I can't sleep. My voodoo doodles from the attic are getting to me. (Sharpie and highlighters on paper. Once again, something I did when I should've been working.)

Prank Posters


At my last job, I worked for a company that did a lot of health-related government grant stuff. Some of the projects were fun, at least in theory...board games and websites teaching kids about the negative effects of drugs, alcohol and tobacco. A lot of the fun was squashed out of the projects (sometimes for good reason, most of the time not), which gave me no end of frustration. One of my diversions was making stuff and putting it up around the office. The "Greatest Gift You Can Give A Bedwetter Is Beer" poster gave me a lot of amusement. One night, it disappeared. A coworker told me that my boss took it down and said that higher ups in the company had complained about it. Possible, but not likely. (He's a whole other story. Or possibly a book.) The "Cannibulemia" poster stayed up for quite awhile. A lady from another department saw it, read it, then said, "Oh, I didn't know we had that project." Never ceases to amaze me what people will believe.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Random Stuff in the Attic




Apparently, I've done a lot of doodling at my various jobs over the years. Seems like I've got folders of junk like this, mixed with test prints of work projects I was working on at the time. I think the list was done during a meeting. And, that green hair is that plastic sushi grass that comes with the sushi you buy at Whole Foods.

Baby Shoes


After rereading this, I was surprised to see all the spelling and grammatical errors. Then again, this was the same year where every week we had to select a word of our choosing to be added to the Spelling list for the week. A couple of my words were "python" and "piranha" which I proceeded to constantly misspell.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Working Class Godzilla

A story I wrote about Godzilla in 4th grade for Mr. Fincham's English class. Another assignment was to write a story from the perspective of a pair of shoes. Most kids wrote about their Keds or girls wrote about ballet slippers. I wrote about a pair of baby shoes and the kid in the story was flushing them down the toilet and stuff like that. It went over really well in class; the kids were cracking up. I was really proud of that story. Surprisingly, my mother (who has always thought I should be a writer) told me that "it wasn't that great."

Two Headed Babies of the World Unite!

The more I think about it, I realize I've created a bunch of stuff for no real reason or purpose other than I felt compelled to make it. Case in point: a paper mache 2 headed baby. Initially it was supposed to be a pinata, but I didn't plan it too well and it would've been too much of a pain to get the armature of plastic bottles out.

Art-O-Matic 2004







In 2004, I was part of a huge group show in DC called Art-O-Matic. I think somewhere around 600 artists displayed work in an old building shortly before it was to be gutted and turned into condos. My friends Kirk Waldroff and Kim Bentley told me about it and I signed up at the last minute without a clue as to what I'd show. I ended up just filling a wall with existing paper bag puppets. To hang them, I punched a hole at the top of each one and crimped a metal grommet in the hole and just hung them from nails in the wall. The "Take One" sign refers to the box of business cards just below it, not the puppets. I was selling the puppets for $10 a pop. And I sold a few. I constantly wonder, what the hell am I gonna do with these things? They're kinda cool, but they're made out of compulsion rather than desire to make archival works of art for sale. No idea how long they'll last; they're just brown paper bags with Sharpie marker. Some are colored with highlighters, white out or Prismacolor pencils.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Dose of Spam Surrealism

Just got a spam e-mail about getting a diploma and at the bottom was a bunch of surrealistic gobelty gook. I've noticed this in various spams and have always wondered why it's there and who the heck wrote it. Some of it borders on genius. For example....

He who makes no mistakes, makes nothing The cobra will bite you whether you call it cobra or Mr Cobra There is illumination at the termination of the subterranean excavation. My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path. Cat a ketch rat, but he a teef he massa fish. If you believe everything you read, you better not read Home sweet home The tide never goes out so far but it always comes in again For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. Never choose bedlinen or a wife by candlelight

If all spam was that entertaining, I'd be much more receptive to it. I mean, come on, I'm learning stuff here. After reading that, I'll NEVER choose bedlinen or a wife by candlelight.

Lunch Puppet Pals



A few more puppets from the archive. Not sure of the dates on these, but they're probably between 2000-2004. Probably 2000-2001, I really got into a groove making these on my lunch hour when I worked at Funny Garbage. I ate at La Conqita a lot and got a loads of brown paper bags from those lunches....red beans, yellow rice topped with stewed pork or beef stew. Also great food at LaHore Deli, but they used plastic bags, not really suited to my needs.

Another Barf Bag


This is the barf bag puppet I did on the way to NYC. It's the first one I've done in a long time. I've done so many of these they all kind of look the same to me. Drawing the full character plus the inside of the mouth is always a bit of a challenge; it can be a confining format.

Paper Bag & Barf Bag Puppets

Just got back from NYC Sunday night. I flew American Airlines which luckily has white, non-plastic barf bags, so I was able to make barf bag puppets coming and going to NYC. The one above is from the return flight and it doesn't have the flap where you can make the mouth open and close. At some point, I'd like to do something with all the paper bag puppets I've made over the years. At last count, I had 500+. Not sure what the current count is, but my production of them has certainly fallen off in the past year or so.

Goonheads on Patrol...

Saxton Moore convinced me to start a blog, so here it goes. I've got tons of projects in the works, zines, trading cards, buttons, websites....so much stuff that it's hard to focus on one thing. I just got some stickers made, I used the same design as I did for my temporary tattoos. So much easier to produce an existing image than figuring out and financing some of the more involved projects. I'd like to do a set of trading cards based on the Alphabeasts that are on my site. When I told a friend about the cards, he mentioned making them lenticular so they animate. The project is on the back burner for the moment. Gotta get the motivation to do all the art, then figure out how and where to get them produced. And then there's the small matter of paying for them.

And all that is without even knowing what I'd do with them once I had them.