Things I've Mistaken for My Cat: Exhibit A

My cat Olive is round and black and has little white feet. I'm not sure if it's my overactive imagination or some sort of brain damage from high school, but I tend to mistake things for her A LOT.


This is Olive.


This is a wadded-up piece of black material with masking tape stuck to it, which i mistakenly invited into the kitchen for breakfast.

Maybe it's time for a visit to the optometrist.

Postal delights

These two things came in the mail:


This is pretty cool.. it's a kit where you can make mini-silkscreens without messing around with chemicals and emulsion. The screens come pre-coated with light-sensitive material, then you stand outside in the blazing southern california sunshine for a few minutes and develop your stencil. If you live in the pacific northwest, you wait until august or use a lightbulb indoors. I'll be posting the results of my silkscreening experiments... you can order a kit here.


This made me really happy.. my pals Sam and Tara sent it all the way from Australia, where they are most likely hugging kangaroos and throwing boomerangs. do you know about Sam Mcpheeters? you should.. check him out here and don't forget to go shopping in his little store. there's some super-cool stuff for dirt cheap, including my Guitar Basics zine.

Salty/Crusty

San Pedro did not dissapoint. We walked through the semi-deserted downtown and pointed to all the salty old sailor bars.. S.P. seems to have the highest ratio of dives per square mile that I've ever encountered, more even than Olympia. This one, 'Tommy's Club', looked pretty promising; however, it was 4 pm and Janet Jackson's 'Nasty' spilling out to the sidewalk from the jukebox did not sweeten the deal. We kept walking.


Down to the waterfront, past the Crusty Crab (yum)..


..to a place that had stuff like this mounted on their wall. I used to have nightmares as a kid about giant sea spiders living in a murky ocean world that existed only under escalators.



We ate fish n' chips and scallop tacos and headed up the hill to the Temple Beth-el, where Justin's philosophy professor was giving a lecture on Symbology, as it pertains to the Christian and Jewish versions of history. Call me ignorant, but most of my knowledge of western religion comes from stuff like this:



..and this:



Which, by the way, I highly recommend.. Mr.Heston wears a jaunty ascot and rows a boat while discussing the creation story.
So, as the lecture continued, and the Professor became more and more wildly possessed by hebrew mis-translations and the icons of Mt. Sinai (he actually reminded me a lot of George Carlin crossed with a southern evangelical preacher, but wearing a yarmulke and speaking w/ a bronx accent), I got a little lost. I started counting how many rad old people in the room were wearing hearing aids, and noted the different styles and sizes. Tomorrow I'm going to Palm Springs with my pal Sam, so we'll see what happens there!

art for your pocket

I forgot that i created this blog to post my art stuff.. this is what i spent December working on, two full-size paintings that will be magically shrunken and coated w/ vinyl. They'll be reproduced as limited-edition wallets for Poketo, the fabulous purveyors of affordable, transportational art. What else has been going on? My new favorite project: pet portraiture. Here's the first one I've done in (hopefully) a long series to come.. his name is Alfredo, he is a 15-year-old Chihuahua mix. I tried to celebrate his Mexican heritage in the details. He belongs to my friend Jamie, who received this painting for xmas from her rad friend (and my patron/landlord) Dave:

Double Nickels

Today is Adventure Day. Justin has lured me into battling gridlock and sitting through a religious lecture with the promise of fresh San Pedro sea air and, most importantly, fish n' chips. The only thing i know about S.P. is that Mike Watt is the hometown hero (is he really writing songs w/ kelly clarkson?? or maybe i just imagined that..) and Todd from F.Y.P. calls it home. Justin's attending a talk on Christianity and Judaism as extra-credit for his philosophy class, and I'm such a sucker for deep-fried goodness that I'll sit through it too. It's too hot and dry in the Valley today, and I need out.. full report to be filed later.

Joining the masses

I recently had a meeting w/ my friends Angie and Ted from Poketo (if you don't know about Poketo, check them out at www.poketo.com!).. we talked about los angeles, ate flat sandwiches, and debated the pros and cons of grad school. One thing that stuck with me was their enthusiasm for artists to really use the web as a platform for free publishing. Angie used the words 'web presence', which I keep tossing around in my head. I've always been a pretty private person, despite outward appearances to the contrary.. not to mention my innate fear of computers. But she's right, I need to make a web presence, so here goes...