Something new
I got this weird idea in my head to create Flash trailers for Hold My Life. First one went up today on GirlAMatic.
The music is from a demo that the Flappybats had cut of our first original, High Heel Mary, and I somehow convinced Rhonda to record a couple clips of Penny's narration from the first episode. Yeah, it's a little sloppy-- I prefer the term "shambolic" myself-- but it was a hell of a lot of fun to do, so I think there'll be more in the future.
Who knows, maybe I can make it a regular feature. Maybe every other week debut a new trailer. We'll see.
My quote for today
If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.
--Keith Richards
My new mantra
"I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd."
-Jeff Tweedy
More Woody
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that.
-Woody Guthrie
Since I'm posting quotes--
“If you play more than two chords, you're showing off.”
-Woody Guthrie
I keep running across the weirdest quotes this week:
'Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.' - Steve Earle
New week
Here we are, Monday once more.
So the mystery musician that I'd alluded to last week turned out to be none other than Peter Case, formerly (and still sometimes currently) of the Plimsouls.
Yeah, the same Plimsouls that recorded Million Miles Away, and appeared in Valley Girl. Peter's been a busy man since then, having recorded several amazing solo albums, and venturing deeper and deeper into folk-inspired music.
I've mentioned a few times here and there that Peter basically lived Penny's life. He's fighting the same machine that Penny's fighting right now, and I'm really honored to have a smattering of his tunes gracing the comic.
www.petercase.com
Sinatra Quote
My friend Greg just handed me a CD-- "The History of American Music -- Rock n' Roll". We're learning a bunch of new Rockabilly tunes, and this has the original versions of some of the songs we're playing.
Anyway, I open it up and see the following quote that just cracked me up:
"Rock 'n Roll: The most brutal, ugly desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear"
-Frank Sinatra
It's counterbalanced by a Jerry Lee Lewis quote on the front cover:
"If I'm going to hell, I'm going there playing the piano"
Damn shame they never worked together...
Open Season on Westerberg!
Err.. actually, that should be "Westerberg on Open Season"
Information is now coming out on the soundtrack for Sony's Open Season animated film, which opens Sept 29. Paul wrote the score for the film with Ramin Djawad, and now it appears that the soundtrack is pretty much a Paul Westerberg solo album. It's even being billed as "Open Season featuring the songs of Paul Westerberg"
The album includes 10 Westerberg originals, of which "Love You in the Fall" and
"Right to Arm Bears" boast Stinson on bass. One Westerberg track each is performed by Pete Yorn ("I Belong [Reprise]") and Deathray ("Wild As I Wanna Be"). And I have to say that I think it's awesome to see that Paul's getting some much-deserved respect and mass-market exposure
Go here, read all aboot it.
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002986769
Soundtrack notes
Hold My Life has something really cool coming up in the soundtrack. An established musician who basically lived Penny's life, and is fighting the same machine she's fighting now in the comic.
I'll mail an original sketch of Penny to the first person who correctly guesses this person's identity. Three clues:
This person was in a band
That band was featured in a movie
This person was recently reunited with a Rickenbacker guitar that was stolen from him 20 years ago.
Oh and Frank and Greg-- you already know the answer so you can't enter the contest. So Hush...
The rest of the month...
After, say, the third week in July, things started to turn a corner. We went to San Diego, kicked around Comicon, I covered a couple of the webcomics panels for comicon.com/pulse... which was interesting.
I can remember going to many of the same panels last year and came out of them thinking "those weren't incredibly informative"-- I dunno, it really didn't seem like I was walking out of those panels with any greater insight into what I needed to do than I had walked in with.
This year? Well, they were better attended, which told me that interest was higher than years previous... and in retrospect I guess they were more informative. Some of them infinitely more informative. I was turned away at the "Webcomics 101 - Getting Started" panel, along with about a hundred or so others who were interested in the same topic, so I can't really speak to how informative or useful that panel had been in comparison to last year's.
I was able to cover Webcomics 102 - Finding An Audience, and Webcomics 103 - How To Make Money, and I can say that there was some improvement in the actual nuts and bolts, useful information that was offered in those panels. I'm still not convinced that anyone's really got much to say on building or finding an audience. If the best advice being offered is to spend lots of time posting on message boards in hopes that people will check out your comic, and to rely on word of mouth-- I dunno, that seems like a huge investment of time with very little in the way of return on your investment. Sure it doesn't cost you anything, but time is a very valuable commodity.
Then again, what do I know? I have a very small audience. I have begun to test a few theories in the past week, but for now they're just theories. And the less said about those the better, for now.
Of course, if they work, I'll be screaming "I knew it" all over the place, but for now, I'll clam up and see what happens.
Webcomics 103 was a freaking cornucopia of ideas, facts and numbers, and was far and away more informative than the previous year's panel. Especially Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary. Incredibly informative. I've gone back and watched the video of that panel a few times now and, frankly, I wish that panel had been an hour longer-- god only knows what they could've gotten around to in that time.
I never know what I've gotten from Comicon until after I've gotten back home and had time to reflect on it. Looking back now, I think I got a much-needed recharge, a break from the grind of everyday life, and a relaxing week away from everything. I also seem to have come away from it with the realization that what I'm looking to do here with the comic and my art is to connect with people. I think that's the source of my angst, is that I don't feel like I've been doing a very good job of that.
Guess every journey starts with a first step. So here we go...
It's always darkest before the dawn (or the Adventures of Roxy and Zeke)
So anyway, this is my second downer post, part of me putting all this behind me. This all does have a positive ending, I assure you. I wouldn't even write any of this if it didn't.
So there we were, our best little black and white buddy gone, and a First Friday artwalk rapidly approaching. Being open on First Fridays, if you're not really behind the idea, is really stressful. So we both just sort'a looked at one another and decided "no way are you in any shape to be working the gallery" And we stayed closed.
On top of that, we found out that the Pit, our favorite local bar, was closing. The Pit was located inside the Ramada Inn in downtown Phoenix, and that had been given to ASU to use for student housing. I guess they didn't think it'd be a good idea to have a dormitory with a bar on the first floor, so our beloved Pit had to go.
By this point, I'm thinking "what the fuck else can go wrong?!?" No cat, no bar, I'm incredibly stressed out and all I want is to have a beer-- but now I won't be able to because the damn bar is gonna be turned into a freaking cafe or a smoothie bar for ASU students.
Life sucks sometimes.
This is, seriously, the first two weeks of July. Halfway done, just days before Comicon, one week before my birthday and lemme tell ya, I'm in a smashing good mood!
But, y'know, things do have a way of turning around. After we had Erlik put down, neither of us really wanted to get another cat anytime soon. But then we started looking online. And Rhonda found this little tabby/calico mix kitty named Penelope that was being fostered by a lady in North Phoenix. She'd been saved from one of the shelters that euthanizes stray cats. We make arrangements to meet Penelope on a Saturday morning.
The thing is, Penelope has a little friend--Jaden. Weird skinny little bowling-pin shaped tabby mix with a pointy face, pencil neck and a big pot belly. Neither of them was older than 9 weeks old. We went to a Petsmart in North Phoenix, and they get Penelope out of her cage. Almost immediately, her little buddy starts looking at me like "what are you doing?" He's looking at me as if to say "that other cat is the only thing I've got in the world, and you're gonna take her away?"
Great, just great. So then we get him out of the cage and decide that if we're gonna take one, we gotta take 'em both. So we did. No way were they keeping those names, though. Penelope and Jaden? Nah-uh. Roxy and Zeke-- much better.
And all of a sudden, things were suddenly looking up.
Back yet again
Okay, so I dropped off the face of the blogosphere yet again.
July was freaking brutal, it seemed like every couple of days, another shoe was dropping, another piece of bad news delivered, and something else seemed to be ending. By the time my birthday rolled around towards the end of the month, I can honestly say that I didn't care if I had a good day or a bad one, I just wanted it to be over.
I'm so upbeat.
Anyway, since we're midway thru August, it's probably time to say goodbye to all the horrible shit that happened to me last month, wash my hands of it and move on to something positive. So that's what I'm gonna do right now.
So what happened in July that was so bad? Well, everything started when we noticed that Erlik, our cat/best friend/constant companion of somewhere around 14 years, had developed Lymphoma. He wasn't eating or doing his business correctly, so Rhonda took the little guy to the vet where they found a lump. After that, they wanted to do X-Rays, which gave them nothing conclusive other than "yep, it's definitely a lump". This took us a week to get confirmation that there was a lump.
We knew something was up, but the tests were inconclusive. We began to suspect that the vet that we were taking him to didn't know what he was doing, or even worse, was outright trying to scam us. So we found an excellent veterinary oncologist, who did an ultra sound and a tissue sample. A few days later we got the results-- Lymphoma, very advanced, and the most aggressive form of it to boot. He had virtually no chance of long term survival.
Now, this is where I admit that Rhonda and I are both a little superstitious about the weirdest things. She and I have been together 16 years. We got Erlik as a newborn kitten less than a year into our relationship. So for the last fifteen years, it's been Me, Rhonda and Erlik. The only constants in our lives have been one another and that cat. When we drove across the country to move to Arizona, it was the three of us, and what little we could cram into our 87 Chevy Nova on the road trip from hell...
I remember the first time we saw him. He was the runt of the litter. The underdog. The weird little cat with the black thing on his nose that got beaten up by the other kitties, and mocked by pretty much everybody who saw him. Nobody wanted him-- but we did. We wanted him for all of those reasons. He was like us.
Erlik liked to eat your hair in the morning, or pretty much anytime it smelled good. He loved to lick Rhonda's arms, and minty things like chewing gum or toothpaste (no we didn't feed him toothpaste, but you hadda see his reaction upon smelling it). He'd pull catnip and cat treats out of the bag with his paw, and he'd drink from a glass if you held it for him correctly. He was a smart cat, and but for a couple of vacations where we left him in Greg's care, I saw Erlik every day of his life.
I can remember moving into our new home this time last year, saying "this is the last place Erlik will ever live". I meant that in the sense that we weren't going to be selling this place anytime soon. Not that the little fucker was gonna die inside a year.
Anyway, he started going downhill quickly. He started isolating himself in the closet, finding dark remote places to lay. He stopped eating almost entirely, but he'd eat from our hands... we knew it was time.
So we took him to the oncologist again, and stayed with him till the very end. And then we went home and cried the rest of the night. It was the end of one era, but it wasn't going to be the last ending we'd face in July...
