I considered taking this one step further and giving Jim a tennis-sweatband.. Or depicting him cross-eyed and mystified. But the truth is I like him. His music played a positive role in the tumult that was my adolescence.

Though the persona he created can seem out of place in the 21st century (quirky and even trite), there should always be a place for champions of free thought and individuality. And there is no doubt that his was the road less traveled.

As Daniel Nester puts it:

“.. I have stopped worrying whether James Douglas Morrison—The Last Holy Fool, Sex God, Black Priest of the Great Society—can join the tenuous tribe of poets. He’s been showing up for the meetings for so long now, there’s no sense in throwing him out.”

Read Daniel Nester’s article in full here, at the PoetryFoundation.org

Palladium presents: Detroit Lives featuring Johnny Knoxville from Palladium on Vimeo.

Really cool to see one of America’s iconic city’s having a renaissance.. This video could have read like a commercial for Palladium, but manages to be all about Detroit, and some really creative people seeing an opportunity for making in impact and grabbing it.

It’s been a while I know.. Been working like crazy, getting ready to move. All kinds of good stuff. Seems like this time of year just goes by so fast, and around January time just slows to a crawl while we all wait for the sun to come back around.

Discovered recently an awesome DIY project, the details of which were posted by its creator here at Up, not North. Some of you might recall an illustration I did recently of an old Corona typewriter. I’d been hoping to transform this into a sweet jQuery driven web app, a simple thing that would animate typing into a text field, but in a really visually rich kind of way. Seeing this just makes me want make that happen that much more.

Growing up  in the Eighties there was the advent of so many geek cultural icons. There were the early personal computers, like the Commodore 64, Amiga, and early Apple Computers, which cost a fortune and promised to do so so much to revolutionize our lives.

During this time games were all over the map, and there was a lot of innovation going on trying to take advantage of the baby-steps taken in early graphics, actual writable memory, and processing speeds. Some might recall the legendary text-based games of the time, Zork and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

THIS wondrous creation is an ode to those halcyon days, providing an interactive, beautiful and tactile interface (although slightly weighty) for Zork fans of all ages. Peep the video and be amazed!

The Automatypwriter from Jonathan M. Gruberman via “Up, not North”

“Somewhere Near Tapachula, by Jonno Durrant and Stefan Hunt: 54 Mexican kids, 37 surfboards, 2 Australian parents, 1 inspiring surf story! Pam and Alan Skuse left their family and their comfortable lives in Australia to volunteer at a Mexican orphanage for one year. They accidentally founded Mission Mexico and are still there ten years later. Five years ago they started teaching children to surf in the deserted world-class local waves. Now the kids rip and the joy of the sport helps them heal from their unimaginable pasts.” via NYSFF.com

SOMEWHERE NEAR TAPACHULA from stefan hunt on Vimeo.

Find out More About ‘Somewhere Near Tapachula’

• Somewhere Near Tapachula – New York Surf Film Festival
• Somewhere Near Tapachula has just been selected.. – GOODCHEER
• New York Surf Film Festival Begins – ESPN Surfing News

Video of one of the most genius DIY recreations I’ve seen in a long time, from Volpin Props in Atlanta. Who was also kind enough to share tips on how he achieved his final product. The detail in this is amazing, and he goes into everything from building circuitry to getting parts cast, chromed, and molded.

I thought I’d also share a link to Rebel 8, interjet home of Cali-Creative Mike Giant, and purveyor of fine and stylish goods. People bite this style like there is no tomorrow, but none compare. Giant is a technician.

And speaking of things California, a friend of mine is traveling to Long Beach in August and it got me to thinking. Having been born there (full disclosure, I didn’t actually grow up there, mostly spent summers there visiting family), I felt the need to share what little I know about spending quality time in the LBC.

• Fingerprints Records : A sweet record store… lots of hard to find music and local goodness… This area is called the Belmont Shores and is on the edge of Long Beach along the shoreline going South towards Seal Beach. A few little shops that are aight.. a little touristy other than Fingerprints.
• MOLAA : The Museum of Latin American Art is pretty dope, and there is an arts district that was just coming up last time I was around. On the edge of downtown Long Beach. A few Black barber shops, bodegas, Rasta shops and a couple of cool bookstores featuring local literature.
• Proper : This little section of East Broadway has a couple of boutique type shops on it and some independent coffee shops. Community garden too… within walking distance of downtown. Downtown Long Beach is a good place to park and walk around, lots of restaurants, a few small cafes, a movie theater. A little pricey, but there are some old shops with character tucked away on the side streets.
• Bixby Park, sometimes know as Cherry Park (but not actually Cherry Park): A good spot to chill, a family park with only the occasional sketchy characters. It is on the outskirts of this Gay-centric strip of bars and shops (Broadway and East 4th), which includes some cool antique stores and the East 4th skateshop that’s been around forever. People used to skate this park up like crazy (it used to have a huge stage on it), it’s been in some historic skate videos. Across the street is Ocean Boulevard and the beach, which is behind breakwaters. I met a someone recently that said that the beach has been cleaned up in recent years. Miles of walking along the shore here, and you can walk up to the Long Beach Museum of Art, which is alright sometimes depending what you’re into.
• VIP records: incubator to Snoop, Doctor Dre and many other LBC locals. Haven’t been there but they are still going strong after 31 years.

What’s missing on this list? Locals have got to know more about the city than me, and I know that LA has a lot to offer too… Holla at me,  or comment on this post, I’d love to learn more about the city I’m from!

Links:

• HOW TO GROW UP IN LONG BEACH – Nate Dogg Reminisces – Vice Magazine.
• East 4th Skateshop
• Volpin Props
• TVI Design
• LA Taco
• VIP Records

This illustration has been in the works for well over three months. I started out by wireframing everything in Illustrator CS3, then moved on to color and shading/highlighting after everything was looking just right. The drawing also incorporates a few parts that I built and rendered using Blender 3D, a little bit of an experiment on my part but one that worked out pretty well. The typewriter is an old Smith-Corona (produced in 1932), not my own, in need of a little TLC and a very pretty writing machine.

Being relatively new to Blender 3D (arguably the best in free, open-source 3D software), I wasn’t quite sure how it would suit my purposes. Thankfully the Blender 2.5 public beta has a snappy new GUI that makes working with Blender a LOT less convoluted. Everything I produced in Blender could be drawn in Adobe Illustrator, with actual reference close at hand, but how often do you get the chance to learn something from scratch? The Blender community provides great documentation, and every time I hit a wall I could pretty much count on there being a video tutorial to walk me through my issues. Thanks to BlendertutsNewbies.com in particular, Kernon Dillon is super good at relating modeling techniques and knows the software inside and out.

If you know me you know that 3D graphics are not a big deal to me, as a rule I’m less likely to enjoy a movie if it is over the top with CGI. That said, 3D is in its embryonic stage, and the merging of live action with 3D is far from seamless or believable in many cases. It is time consuming to produce, and resource-draining to run (Blender crashed at least a dozen times rendering small parts for Corona on my meager MacBook). BUT it is super handy when you are recreating materials using different kinds of lighting and deciding how they might best reflect light or cast a shadow. The software is getting better by leaps and bounds, and already you can see that big cheeses like Adobe are taking notice.

This illustration is on the market. Pricing is, as always, dependent on context. Different licensing = different pricing. Let me know if you have a special use case, I would be glad to accommodate. Enjoy!