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New York is our home, but we love a good road trip out west.
Above and below are two in-progress sketches for my contribution to the third issue of Mammal Magazine, which we’re aiming, fingers crossed, to have printed and ready by the fall. The theme for our third issue is ‘FEAR.’
Tying in these images into the context of fear has yet to be done for the final pieces, but I’m working on it (although the clown may be able to hold his own in that arena).
What began as fun on a xerox machine after work this past Friday became a full-blown preoccupation on Sunday. I work at a record company so on some days, I worry about my job security. Machine guns can work just about anywhere so lucky for them, they have no such concerns.
Tangentially on the criss-crossing subjects of music and machine guns, the title of this post, ‘Huge Gold AK-47′ was first a song title on the the Blood Brothers’ Young Machetes album, which expertly showcases the band’s finest examples of their particular brand of damaged and fearless and fuck-all rock and roll. Highly recommended.
I keep long, late hours. I tend to wake up in a sour mood if I feel that I hadn’t made the most of my available time outside of work the evening prior, so if I’m overtired by the end of the week, the choice is most often wholly my own and I accept full responsibility.
Something that’s only recently occurred to me is that a natural side effect for keeping such long hours with what amount to be a constant rotation of various client-based or self-initiated projects, is that that funny, buzzy feeling of overstimulation sustains itself a little bit more than l’d prefer. Short of horse tranquilizers or a Buddhist-for-hire, the ability to dial the brain down before I go to bed is a bit of a challenge.
To combat this, I’ve begun closing the days out by digging up earlier sketchbook drawings I’ve done and reworking them without any thematic motive or intent. It’s a narrative free, subtext free, meaning free excuse to play with a picture and explore all of my idiotic, baseless impulses. The one above was a recent experiment by adding arbitrary bubbles of color around what was before just an ordinary drawing of someone’s head. I couldn’t explain the motivation to do that specifically to his head, but I did discover that it was extremely satisfying to wind the day down by playing around with something without the self-imposed pressure to ask yourself what, specifically, it means. Plus, I slept like the dead.
We live close to the corner of the block. There has been considerable construction on the street in two separate spots on said corner both in front of our building and a few yards to the southeast. As a consequence, mice burrowing beneath the street have been, uh, displaced and have been moving themselves into all varieties of new dwellings.
Like our home.
A short while ago, a lone gunman was discovered on one of our sticky traps, very much alive, but struggling. Presuming the mouse to be one of the strays from the street, we took pity on him. With the help of a knife sharpener (not a knife) and no small amount of difficulty, I was able to dislodge the mouse from the sticky trap and set him free outside for him to find his way. I felt good about this.
The following day, we caught another one in another sticky trap in our living room. This was reassuring in a way, as the mouse was nowhere near the kitchen.
Thirty minutes later, we had caught two more on one single trap. War was seemingly declared. These three were drowned as a warning to others.
We officially have a mouse issue. I am so completely nonplussed about this. It’s wearing on us both.
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