Archives for "Ramblings"
Pocket sandwich math
So I was recently recalling an old ’80s infomercial for a fabulous little kitchen appliance dubbed the SNAKMASTER. It was essentially a small electric sandwich grill that presses your creation into little triangular pockets.
I think they’re fairly commonplace now, but whoo boy, it seemed like a real innovation to me at the time. Somehow my brother and I must have convinced our mom to buy one. At least for a few years there it seemed like we were always sitting around after school, cookin’ up some sort of glorious (read: disgusting) pocket creation.
In memoriam, I present a Choose Your Own Sandwich sketch, featuring some of the ingredients that most dazzled my ten-year old tastebuds.
My fave combo probably would have been The Breakfast Pocket: 4 + 5 + 6 + 9 +2
Aside: I can’t even believe it, but the original infomercial is actually on youtube. Thank you, Internet!
Parallel Universes
This is a page from a little storybook I drew for my sweetheart. It stemmed from a lovely random morning conversation about something in the world we needed to take care of – view the whole set to find out what!
All sentiment aside, it was fun to make. I really, really like working in more of a sequential format and have been tossing around some petite book ideas for some time now. I still have the two burning Vertical Cities follow-ups burning up a significant portion of my right brain, though. We’ll see!
Springtime in Austin
Things have felt especially sensory-spiked the past week — could be that it’s finally started raining again. That loamy, damp spring smell is always a bit of a high in and of itself. Incidentally, Demeter has a fragrance called “Wet Garden” that almost kinda approximates it (unfortunately the scent evaporates way too quickly, as is the case with most of their stuff).
You know, at some point way back I remember hearing that they had this full-on fragrance laboratory in Manhattan, filled with all sorts of the really obscure scents (like Funeral Home, Bacon, Condensed Milk, and Chalk), but I have an idea I’ve conjured this resplendent mental image of it that’s way out of line with reality. Like you have to utter a secret password to be granted access and then it’s a whole subterranean maze of foggy corridors and floor-to-ceiling shelves full of colored glass bottles, scents of every description all in alphabetical order.
Spent the morning holed up in the upper echelons of the UT library with a smuggled mega-cup of JP’s ultra-octane latté. Looking for pix/info on the Limbourg Brothers’ illuminated calendars as I’ve been kinda sorta noodling with the idea of taking a stab at a modern take on them.
Hot pink, an ode
Inside closed eyes lies the canvas for day & night dreams: pools of milky black offset by the ghosting of blood vessels, nerves, and other assorted arithmetic patterns that point to a greater natural language. Faintly purple bursts fade to strawberry whorls.
A fingerprint, a blot, a parade of sunspots.
Even entrenched in the neon faux-glory of the ’80s, I felt a slight nausea toward the never-ending parade of fluorescents, the wide chartreuse shoelaces, Hypercolor t-shirts and neon feathered keychains. Then one weekend we went to the Crayola factory and I saw a vat of molten day-glo pink up close, all fat, fat bubbles and the thick scent of hot wax.
As a kid I’d always been fascinated by color wheels and the different models used to create them (Munsell, CIELAB, Swedish NCS, etc.), and in this moment, staring into the steaming psychedelic impudence, I wondered where this color could possibly fit into the spectrum. So aberrant, it seemed, so manmade and impossible to belong to a natural order.
It wasn’t until the drive home that evening that it suddenly made so much sense. You know those certain dusks, when the sun’s just begun to graze the horizon line, making a perfect red disk with no visible corona? Nose pressed to the backseat window glass, I stared directly at it, that perfectly hot slice of round neon red. Roy G. Biv, you’re out there somewhere, I said. Twenty years later I marvel at the many shapes the colors take. Undefinable, somehow, yet ever-present in fluorescent bursts.
The pink train
Today I boarded the B train only to find it transformed into a pink confectioner’s delight of public transport. My eyes then fixed upon the smiling passengers.
This must be a dream, I thought, as the sweet scent of nitrous oxide filled the air.
my ideal home
* by a sea filled with sugarwater rather than saltwater
* soft wiggle-between-your-toes sand
* morning fog leads to
* daytime sunshine leads to
* evening thunderstorms and
* crystal clear starry nights
* next to a forest with wishing pools
* secret labyrinthine caves
* trains crossing every night with non-existent passengers and destinations, just so i can fall asleep to the low sirens and chug-chug-chugs
* noisy seagulls to wake up to
* a psychic lover who doesn’t speak to me and vice versa; we only communicate through eyes, bodies, and maybe sand drawings
* one month of the year in which everything is snow-covered and icebergs float by in the sea
*anti-gravity paint so i can illustrate the air around me
