This was a fun one. My friend Ken's six months younger than me, and we've been friends since junior high (shoutouts to Carnegie Middle Skool!), so making this made me a bit nostalgic, which naturally made me think of Rip Van Winkle (?). Yes, themes -- however arbitrary -- are useful when making stuff.

So, in making this CD and its components there was a lot of cutting, and distressing and generally making it look like some late sixties silk-screen project gone horribly awry. Hobo signs were employed, in addition to forms used by the police to identify suspicious persons (forms are cool).

This is a little template I've been employing of late, to break me out of the rut of using regular jewel cases. In the end, it's like a mini-LP, which makes me wish I had a mini-turntable to display it beside, and a mini-record-store-snob to be holding it and showing off how little wear there is on its silvery surface, and how if you'd buy it for his excellently low price, he can score an excellently small bag of weed which he could enjoy in his miniature patchouli-smelling apartment. Ahem.

Musically, it's a 78-minute trip through lots of the noisier end of prog-rockishness, with a couple pop tunes for respite. Best of all, I have some great Maria Bamford bits bookending the whole thing, so it's almost like a concept album. That is, if the "concept" is "I'm creating a schizophrenic/ delusional journey through the music that Ken might like from the last two years, which doesn't seem that long ago, because yeah, I am really at the age where time does fly alarmingly, and yes, it is a little like waking up under a tree 100 years later and having an impressively long and white beard." Or something like that.

The fearless and/or aged and/or musically adventurous can download it here.

My fourth iPod, the venerable Atlas Folderol IV, has passed. Technically, he's not dead, he's just doing this incredibly annoying stopping-for-a-second-or- so-five-or-six-times-a-day thing. And, as luck would have it (oh, blogspot namedrop so intended), my extended warranty ran out July 30.

So I took him in to the Apple store, thinking there might be some cure they could offer. "So it makes a noise when it stops? Like a clicking? Hm. Not good." The Genius tech then explained to me about the "Restore Settings" feature in iTunes, whereby it reinstalls the iPod's software, which, in some cases, can fix the stopping problem. The only thing: it erases the iPod in the process. No, no, no. Not okay. Firstly, there's 23,967 songs on there, and yes, they're backed up, but have you ever copied 23,967 songs to an iPod? It takes some time.

Plus, there's the issue with the playlists. And as it stands, there's no easy way to export them out of iTunes. In fact, the last time around with iPod numero 3, I took screen captures of a bunch of them, which is not always effective, because there's no way a 6-hour party playlist is fitting on one screen. So while the tunes issue is solved by just refilling the new iPod, the playlist issue is something else. This is what I told Genius dude, who kind of yeah-yeahed with his head. Then he asked to hook it up for some diagnostics. That's when he looked. And said, "Oh, wow. Yeah, you've got a lot of playlists. A lot of playlists… I've never seen so many playlists…"

Because there's over 200. Yeah, I know, but hey, they're well organized. There's basically three categories: Nighttime (denoted by the symbol "*"); Gym ("#"); and finally, General Use ("%"). And each one is followed by the time, i.e. "54.14", meaning 54 minutes, 14 seconds. Handy when you're setting the time on the elliptical.

The titles? Yes, they're pretty absurd, via the Internet Anagram Servant. Because to me, "Monday Sux" is not really a title. Well, that I'd want to use, anyway. But, if you type "Monday Sux" into the Anagram Servant, you get cool stuff, like "As Dun My Ox," because yeah, an ox could totally be dun, and really, doesn't a dun ox make a fitting metaphor for a Monday? Unexpected poetry from a completely banal sentiment. Then you've got a map: what kind of songs would a dun ox want to hear on a Monday? Oh, the possibilities.

So, in conclusion. What did I name my fifth iPod? Jersey Codswallup V, naturally. And no, it's not an anagram.

Back to copying...

Here's a recent (well, semi-recent, anyway; what do you want? My last post was in February) illo I did for my good friend Laura at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. It's my first foray into medical illustration, and it was good times. It's about pluripotent stem cells (which are adult stem cells, as opposed to embryonic stem cells, which people tend to get upset about), and it's exciting and so new that my cursory Google images search brought up about three examples, all of which had mice and badly-drawn neurons. Which made this project extra exciting as we had to come up with something new to explain the process. Also exciting, as it just may come up when someone else Google image searches "pluripotent stem cells," and I don't know that I've ever done an illo that someone might consider useful.

Seeing as this was my perhaps one opportunity for immortality (har), I decided to seize this bull by the horns (which I type only because I so love that scene in The Breakfast Club, so much so that I almost want to include a jpeg, but no, I will refrain), and do it the hard way. What I mean by "the hard way," all you hardcore postscripters/bezier masters is that I was going to use no strokes in Adobe Illustrator. What this means for all you unfamiliar with the program is that I was setting myself up to draw about a jillion points. Imagine that instead of a line having two points, it's now an itty-bitty square with four. You can see by this simple math alone, it's at least twice the work.

The brain alone had 676 points! Which reminds me a bit of a illo I did for Java City a few years back that involved drawing about 700 Christmas lights. With no duping, i.e. I drew every one. I'm dumb like that.

But hey, it's good practice! For carpal tunnel, certainly. Plus, now I have a stockpile of 'lil organs that I can save in cold storage and admire, Dahmer-style. Gimme your address, and I'll send you one. No, seriously. You never know when you'll need a little extra pancreas.

So, I've been making these sketchbooks for a few years now, and it's gotten kinda silly. By "silly," I mean at one point I did them for friends for special occasions, and when I did them for myself, they were for "serious" sketching only. At some point I made myself a memo pad, and I think that's when the silliness started; after having a cool-looking custom memo pad, it's hard to justify using post-its. Did I mention I hate post-its? Well, maybe hate is too strong a word...

Anyhow, this one here's called "Timor Tom, or the Case of the Insufferable Voyd." Timor Tom's another legendary whale from Moby Dick, and the rest is somewhere between Melville's chapter heading style and the titlephilia (I'm sure there's a real term for this somewhere) of the inimitable (but oft-imitated) Edward Gorey.

So you know what this one's for? Phone numbers. Notes to self. The size of the last rectangle I drew in Adobe Illustrator. Yep. Faaaascinating stuff. Perhaps if I encase it in a time capsule, 500 years from now it will look like some sort of Rosetta stone for deciphering sushi take-out menus. If only.

Happy faux-love-holiday to you all! I'm in this group on last.fm called The Monthly Mixtape, and every month there's a theme. So this month's theme was "Baby, I Want to Crush Your Soul." Hence, the following mix:



01. Sic Alps, Love is Strange: A wonky little ditty about the universality of the 'L' word, with the requisite threat of violence.

02. Ben Folds Five, Song for the Dumped: This song is the reason I posted early. An absolutely hilarious classic for the jilted.

03. Pixies, Something Against You: What's scarier than a frothing, raving Black Francis? A frothing, raving Black Francis singing through a *megaphone*.

04. Of Montreal, She's a Rejector: Superbly byzantine hook about paying someone to smack yer ex.

05.Tomahawk, Honeymoon: "Eyes like piss-holes in snow" – it's a honeymoon with *Mike Patton* after all.

06. Black Tambourine, For Ex-Lovers Only: Underappreciated girl-group shoegaze from the late 90s.

07. Wilco, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: Jeff Tweedy does the best passive-aggressive love songs, after repeating the title, he admits: "Still I'd be lyin' if I said it wasn't easy."

08. Sightings, Hate Take Hate: The word "paroxysm" comes to mind.

09. Hum, I'd Like Your Hair Long: Anthemic and bitter is a powerful combo.

10. Beck, Asshole: Another jiltcore classic.

11. Squeeze, Another Nail for My Heart: I'm not sure if chamber-pop anglophilia makes heartbreak more or less tragic.

12. Converge, You Fail Me: Absolute, brutal, seething, unrelenting anger channelled through a guitar part consisting of simply one note.

13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modern Romance: The flip-side to the incandescent optimism of "Maps."

14. Polvo, When Will You Die for the Last Time in My Dreams: I'd never tracked down the lyrics for this one before, and after reading, I'm not sure what it's all about. But Ash Bowie's vocal delivery and the five final pummelling minutes pay off the title pretty well.

There you have it; well, that is if you download it here.

Technical note: best results when "sound check" is turned off in iTunes; a couple of the cross fades sound weird with it on. I promise: the songs have been equalized!