There are a couple of things I have come to understand in my quest to become a 59 year old over night internet sensation.

1. People love free stuff.  If you give them entertainment for free you will be your best pal, if you try and explain to those same people that there is a lot of work involved in doing art or (in my case) animation they will drop you like a hot ham dinger.
2. People love their stuff delivered regularly, especially the aforementioned free stuff. It is internet canon that the bar in you “engage-o-meter” will continue to climb to lofty heights if you deliver stuff to the waiting eyeballs on a regular basis (and for free, did I mention that before?)

Allegedly there is a point somewhere along the line that you can start to parlay that “regularly delivered free stuff” into cash but hell if I have discovered it.  Additionally, you have to do a crap-tonne of work to get to that mythical moment, all while trying to maintain a life outside, the kind of life that involves family/friend/regular meals.  That last one is problematical because unless you become a ward of the state or queue at the soup kitchen it doesn’t come free.

There is, in fact, no such thing as a “free lunch”.

Trying to balance all of this gets a bit “long in the tooth” and stress levels can build.  Trying figure out ways to make your bills on the internet is stressful…which is why every now and then you have to take a breath, step back and go off the grid.

Avoiding FACEPLACE, turning off my phone and going back to blogging is my way of doing that. I have some ideas for a couple of projects I have to work out so time to go into stealth mode.

In the animation world I produced a couple of pieces for film projects I have gotten involved with.  Both films are in “pitch” stage so the deadlines were tight but the connection are good and I like the folks I am working with.  I haven’t posted these to social media because they are kind of “not ready for prime time” but we’re all friends here in the nerd-zone.

The first one is for my pal Eric Proedoehl who is one of the world’s greatest scholars on the song “Louie,Louie”.  If you think that sounds odd to you, and yo are reading MY blog then you are probably here by accident.  Welcome kindly stranger, I hope you find what you are seeking. I met Eric working on a shoot over theHolidays and we hit it off right away.  Additionally the story he told me about the song entertained and amused me to the point that I welcomed his invitation to come onboard to work on it.

I did a quick teaser to get warmed up on the project and here it is…

The second piece I did was a bumper for Crissy Field Media’s Documentary about KSAN radio, the original model for all the rock radio stations that my generation grew up with.  A problem that the production has been running into is that whereas there are air checks and radio interviews of the players at KSAN from that time period there is not a lot of film (nd it predates general Video by at least a decade).  To help out I have been experimenting with motion graphics that adapt my style from StepstoneMed to animated characters that use the aforementioned  audio as the voice track. Initially I tried using a photograph and giving it the Denton Philbert/Terry Gilliam treatment but it wound up looking like a psychotic beaver with rabies when I synced it up. In the end I redid the whole thing in Harmony and wound up with this…

Whereas I want to tweak the mouth shapes I am not totally dissatisfied with it.  I have also been doing some experimenting in After Effects with 3D models and will be incorporating this sort of work with that in the coming days.

WHAT I AM READING

My son Nicholas turned me on to the wonder that is ADVENTURE TIME several years ago and I have been intrigued by it ever since.  I think my fascination stems from my general fascination with where animation has gone since the late nineties.  Having kid during that time gave me a “beard” to watch everything that came out (as if an animated needed one) and I has been a wonderful ride. Chris McDonnell’s book THE ART OF OOO shows in intimate detail how much work goes into the production of AT , further proving that nothing is ever as easy as it might seem. The book is filled with thoughtful commentary by all the storyboard artists and character designers as well as the voice actors and producers.  If you are a fan of Adventure time yo owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this book

The proprietor of FREDERATOR, Fred Siebert, says we are in a golden age of animation, specifically the work coming from the web (like Adventure Time) and I tend to aggree. The availability of tools, starting with FLASH, and the development of new distribution channels on the web have opened the animation world up like an oyster.  Granted no one has really come up with any really profitable new models to work with it so budgets can remain tight, but at the same time the mind reels at the possibilities.

I have wanted to get involved in this revolution for a very long time, specifically since I did the first Denton Philbert stuff in 1999 and when I saw what MONDO MEDIA was doing with THE GOD AND DEVIL SHOW but alas, I had a child to finance and other issues that got in the way. Now though Nicholas is off at school and life is different, and this book supplies more than enough inspiration to light a burner under those old aspirations.

While I was making my tea this morning I found myself pondering something:

“How did a country formerly populated by frugal people who lived within their means, respected education and the experience that come from the passing of years in another’s life come to the end that we see today?”

What can I say, I think about those sort of things in the morning.  I guess it’s ’cause I have more blood flow to my brain early in the day. Anyway, my brain started tracking the progression of financial manipulation, a lot of it over the span of my own life, although I wasn’t involved at the beginning being too distracted by jungle adventures in the back garden.

That is not t0 say that I wasn’t connected at the beginning though.  As a kid I loved the work of UPA animation studios and John Hubley. Hurley was the creator of Gerald McBoing-Boing, which was my Mom’s nick name for me, as well as Mr. McGoo.  He was also one of the ANIMATION MODERNE style of animation, in it’s final form I mean (the style actually had it’s root in pre-war hollywood during the POST DISNEY ANIMATORS STRIKE).

In the 1950s John, still at UPA started doing a series of commercials for BANKAMERICARD, the credit card that eventually became VISA. Through his charming use of line and color, combined with familiar voice actors and music, these animations began convincing Americans that it was just SWELL to spend beyond your means.  One spot in particular touched my fancy but I have been unable to find a copy online.  It involved a conductor conducting an orchestra with quite a flourish whilst BANK-AMERI-CARD text exploded on the screen in time to thundering chords.

John, and later his wife and collaborator Faith, did a lot of amazing animation work over their lives and are not responsible for the economic morass we find ourselves in, if anything their politics were diametrically opposed to the forces that were driving us headlong into this mess, but it all comes back to a simple fact of animation life.

“A guy has gotta eat.”

This fact has allowed a lot, well frankly bad, men use a lot of good men and women to do things against their very nature.

I don’t want to end on that note so I will close with a couple of swell John Hubley Pieces to clear your palette…

The universal joke about PLAYBOY is “I read it for the articles”.  In it’s heyday that comment was less disingenuous than it is today.  At it peak PLAYBOY paid good money to the finest writer, both establish and up and coming.  One article that had an influence on me was “The Ball Turret gunner” by John Irving, I read it a couple of times and learned a lot from it about wordcraft.  That article would later be published as the first chapter of “The World According to GARP”, a book that became something of a milestone for my generation. Hugh Hefner employed excellent literary editors and they gathered into the pages of the magazine stuff that was actually worth reading.
So the reason that this joke about “reading the articles” exists about this magazine revolves around the elephant in the room.  The exquisitely airbrushed elephant in the room. The Elephant that made men profess to reading in way that they professed about no other magazine. One did not have to gibber about SPORT ILLUSTRATED and announce “I read it for the Sports” or profess that one read LIFE for “all the pictures”.  There was one reason you had to announce your predilection for literary consumption when you spoke about PLAYBOY, and that was boobies.

Now at risk of calling down upon myself the wrath of the internet I want to go on the record to say that I am pro boobies.  There is an aesthetic appeal to them that is hard wired into my fully functioning Y chromosome.  To say that I learned to expertly move the cleansers (and put them back exactly where they had come from) under my parent’s sink to read the latest from Norman Mailer would be to deny who I am. I won’t do that, yes Senator I looked at the pictures…and inhaled.

At the same time though I was not your typical kid either and there were two other things I found in the pages of PLAYBOY that were to have a significant impact on who I am both as a man and as an artist.  The first thing was the work of Alberto Vargas, it captivated me in a way so much deeper than the simple subject matter it portrayed.  By the time I was sneaking under the sink I was also making sophisticated models of airplanes, and to do that I bought my first airbrush at the age of 12. Looking at Vargas’ work, which I later learned was actually mostly water color, motivated me to take the Luftwaffe grey out of my Binks Wren and replace it with ink I swiped from my Dad’s drawing table.

The second thing that touched me (feel free to snicker at that turn of phrase) was the cartoons.  Our family was infatuated with cartooning and I was exposed to it at an early age.  Now because I was the baby of the family I of course had my stacks of Charles Schultz, books I dutifully copied Snoopy from into my notebooks, but there was more than that.  My Dad loved Charles Addams and would often go to the base library where they had a selection of books of his work.  These would adorn the coffee table for a few weeks and I would inevitably pick them up, and I would inevitably laugh.  At first I didn’t understand them but that is what older sibling are there for, to explain such things. Along with Addams came books of Bill Mauldin and those were soon followed by Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.  This started as soon as I could read, around the age of three or four.

The thing that set me off down this avenue of memory was a bit of news I heard today.  PLAYBOY is now being edited by Hugh Hefner’s daughter and she has set about making some changes.  Last year it was announced that the magazine was eliminating the model and nude spreads from the magazine. making is such that all you can read PLAYBOY for anymore is the articles.

Today though I heard that PLAYBOY is eliminating the cartoons in the back. I wish I could say I was shocked, but I’m actually not.  We live in a society where doing something different is frowned upon, where conformity is king.  We have gone from a nation of innovators to a speculating horde of “me too” monied investors who shun risk at all costs in favor of “ME TOO DADDY! ME TOO!”

When Hugh Hefner brought out the first issue of PLAYBOY it was different, scandalous, exciting. It was soft core porn with literature to back it up. It was different. Sad to say that doesn’t sell in an America fed on Reality TV and Manufactured Presidential candidates.

Ah the swinging sixties, where dudes were dudes and chicks were chicks. Drugs were everywhere, love was in the air, as well as in every VW microbus, and was relatively safe. Things were SWINGIN’, and even the tawdry old guard of the Republican party was trying to cash in on it, ’cause that is what they do (cash in on stuff).

Of the old guard, none were older or “guarder” then President Richard Mulhouse Nixon. The kids were driving him crazy with that whole “We don’t wanna die for your corrupt buddies in Southeast Asia so you can make nice with China” and they hadn’t responded well when they got shot at Kent State either.

“What can I do about those pesky kids?” he thought in the darkened oval office, sounding something like a villain from Scooby Doo.

“What to do?” How about go on a mainstream comedy show and act like a doofus so they can all see that I am just a REGULAR SCHMO. (I am pretty sure he would have said Schmo, he was that kind of guy).

By the time he did this he had already gone behind the back of a standing president to meddle in international affairs to ensure his election. About the same time his minions were stirring up Hard Hat workers in Chicago, setting the stage for an entire generation of folks voting against their own best interests.  A couple of years down the road he would sanction actions that would drive him from office in disgrace, but saving him a trial that would most likely have gotten pretty ugly.

All of that though was either unknown or in the future, none of it would sour the fact that a sitting President of the United States went on Network TV like a dancing bear to prove he was a hip, swingin’, 1960s kinda dude.

Richard Nixon, I salute you!

So much love for this piece that Steve Cutts did for the producers at the Simpson. The primary design of the short works on me on so many levels, I mean you are reading the verbiage of a guy who got married in a Miami Vice style white suit and bought all his groomsmen fish ties to wear during the ceremony after all. This was my first exposure to Steve Cutts work…or so I thought until I read an interview with him over on Cartoon Brew.  It seems he was also responsible for a short I had seen earlier called man.  I loved the style of that film and the dark 1970s anti-pollution imagery.  I say “1970s” because that was when we were all young and caring about the world actually mattered to us and was not simply something a marketing babe put on a granola bar to make it sell better on the West coast.

The cartoon brew article attracted me in the first place because it told about how Steve got the job in the first place.  Basically the producers of the Simpsons saw his work on the Internet and called him to ask would he, by any chance, be interested in doing a couch gag for the longest running animated series since the beginning of time as we know it?

That part of the story give me hope as it confirm what I have been thinking for years, they are out there watching you on the net if you keep pushing…

There is this great old Gary Larson cartoon that I am reminded of all the time on the internet. It has four panels, a rattlesnake rattling, a blowfish blowing up, a cat with his back arched and a guy on a street corner with a raincoat, a floaty sea horse ring, a rubber boot on his head and a shotgun.  The caption? How nature says “Hands off”.

I wish there were simple signs like that on there internet.  Some websites with garish animated GIFs used as tiled backgrounds and tiny rainbow colored text extolling conspiracy theories about the moon landing do a pretty good job of warning you off, the graphic equivalent of a galosh on the head. (For the love of god don’t subscribe!) The trouble is there is no equivalent of those kind of warnings when it comes to software.

Where I really would like a warning that goes along with a piece of software that another product, like…oh say WORDPRESS installs,  A warning that goes even further when said software installs said ancillary software with a LARGE CANDY LIKE BUTTON on it. I mean a rollover that tells you something like:

“This is a real cool new high tech plug-in that we think is gonna be ESSENTIAL , once it stops randomly linking your post to SANTAPORN.COM”

It would be even cooler if as your mouse got closer to the “activate” radio button it played the theme from JAWS or a recording of an old Catskills comedian saying:

” You sure you wanna do that boychik?”

The silver lining to all this though. Once you work through all the debugging and swearing and tormenting of pets, after all the hours of wondering where you went wrong with your career choices and maybe working for that psychopathic web developer wasn’t THAT BAD you find the problem and with one click all your problems go away.

For one brief moment, you are the king of the internet and everything smell like fresh baked bread.

The trouble is that in the software world if something is perfect that works against your business model, especially if your business model is in the SWINGING 1980s when everything was JET SET on STEROIDS.  If you did’t double your “bottom line’ each quarter then you were a loser.

So what do you do if you do to a product that works fine, does everything that the user wants and is easily upgradeable, even when processors where changing faster then developers underwear (if they wore any)?  Enter the concept of the UPGRADE, taking a product and making it BETTER! Well, making it more complicated so you could sell more software.  At first that was easy.  Make it so you can use a lot of fonts, check.  I will add a note here that the guy who decided you should be allowed to use as many fonts as you want should be forced to live in a room papered with flyers that use every single font delivered with a new computer. Also making it easy for you to add pictures and graphic.  also very cool.

After awhile though you run out of features like a six year old trying to explain why the fifth cookie jar is broken and his face is covered in chocolate. New features go in that maybe shouldn’t.  I stopped using WORD a long time ago but I have it on good authority that the latest version will make you breakfast…if you buy the MICROSOFT BREAKFAST plug ins and interface divide (batteries sold separately).

What got me off on this tangent?  Well, I set part of today aside to work on this BLOG, this one you are reading, and made the mistake of upgrading WORDPRESS without thinking.  Now my nice, simple, remote access blogging tool is now connected to some mainframe in “Whoknowswhereistan” and is supplying me with new editors that take simple things the old editors did just fine and replaced them with shiney new ones.  New ones that don’t work right/yet.

I could go on an on about this but my iBreakfast is heating up and I have to go into preferences to set how I want my Turkey Bacon cooked.

So I am not going to use that word as I test stuff on this, my new Omega Blog site.  Nor am I going to use standardized greeking, something can also garner you the results I mentioned before.  Rather I am going to use something that is guaranteed to annoy some of my readers.

I am going to use quote from some of my favorite pop culture sources.  Suck on that guys.