Guys I know it’s a little lame to use your blog just to post funny stuff from YouTube, but whoa. This thing made me laugh so hard my whole shirt front is snot and tears now. Thanks to my brohambles Nate Stapley who mentioned it on his Twitter. By the way Nathan is my second-favorite Twitterer in the world, dude is funny. Okay so anyway, behold the fishermen:

Oh, the things we go through in the name of true, pure, senses-shattering beauty.

So if you guys have not been following my Twitter feed, you may not know that last Thursday I, at long last, after great GREAT trepidation, went under the knife and had my two front teeth cut out. They’re the same teeth I knocked out originally when I was thirteen, and which then the dentist crammed back into my head. After the root canals, they told me they’d turn black and fall out (OMG!) in around 7 years, but today I’m 35 years old, and more than 22 years have gone by. Apparently the teeth had become fused to the bone over the years, so instead of dramatically turning black and falling out, they just turned a sort of muddy brown over the years, and little pieces would break off now and then.

Either way, it turned out that, while they were indeed fused to the bone, they were being “resorbed” by my body, meaning my body was eating them slowly away, and soon they’d just break off and fall out. I really can’t think of anything more terrifying to me–after all this time, including the entirety of my teenage years and adulthood, of being afraid of my teeth falling out, it’s a pretty powerful fear for me. So I agreed that we should cut these badboys out and start putting something in their place, rather than wait for the worst weekend ever to occur, or one to break off while I was kissing a girl or eating peanut brittle or something.

This is what they looked like a few weeks before the surgery:

(that photo’s by my man Dylan Chorneau, he’s kind of amazing)

So it happened. The night before me, Dylan, Piemaker and Anida met for a last toast to my poor old little brown beans, splashing a little Jameson’s over them one more time. The next morning my friend Kate very kindly took me to the oral surgeon’s office, whose receptionist you can tell a direct lie to and she’ll choose to believe you because she can tell you would argue her forever otherwise (the lie was whether or not I’d had a cup of coffee that morning: I had). A few minutes later I was waking up high as all get-out, blood all over my mouth, and with something massive inside of my mouth. It was the appliance that my actual dentist The Roz (Dr. Gordon Roznik, D.M.D.) had made for me, essentially a retainer with two big ole teeth on the front.

You have to remember that I’ve had these undersized weak teeth–I don’t know if I’ve ever bit confidently into an apple in my adult life–forever, so the idea of something being normal-sized in that space was pretty weird. So at first I guess I thought it was normal for my mouth to not be closing all the way–strangely, before I busted them out I had some big ole buck teeth, so I just assumed it was back to that. Remember I was high as heck on Thursday.

But by Friday my face was hurting like crazy, and I could tell the appliance wasn’t fitting right. I also was getting more and more concerned throughout the weekend about this pain in my face–I can definitely be pretty whiny, but I’m not bad with handling pain, especially when taking these massive 800mg Motrin’s every 6 hours. But the pain didn’t seem to be lessening at all. I really hadn’t had any instruction from the surgeon as to what to expect, so I felt kind of lost–I would take my appliance out and peer at the horrifying wounds and just sort of wonder if that was how they were supposed to look.

That’s why I love The Roz so much–on Monday morning I trooped down to his office, ostensibly to follow up on the fit of my appliance. But while I was in the chair I asked The Roz to check out my wounds–sure enough, I had the dry socket! TIMES TWO! Without hesitation The Roz was cleaning those badboys out, before I even had a chance to grab something to keep from screaming, then packing some sort of numbing medicine stuff in there to promote healing, then handing me a bottle of special rinse and patiently answering all the questions I was wincing out at him. Time elapsed–maybe 4 minutes. Charge = $0. The other guy cut my teeth out for $900 and all I got was a handout telling me to rinse with salt water and apply ice!

Not only that, but The Roz hooked up my appliance too, although he had to shave some of my crooked teeth down to get everything to fit, and now my fake teeth are so sharp I could bite your finger off. But when I left his office I was feeling 1000% better than when I walked in. It’s not just The Roz either, it’s his whole staff, everyone is just super friendly and relaxed and trying to figure out how to help you, from the hygienists to the receptionists. I feel like a star when I walk in there, it’s amazing. We’re talking about THE DENTIST here, you know? But I love The Roz, he’s the best, and that’s saying something for a guy with more than his share of dental fright (me). Check out what I look like now, I’m giddy:

Okay that’s all I have to say–isn’t it plenty? I’m working on a short comic about all this to post next month, so you’ll get the update then. In the meantime, if you live anywhere near Charlotte and are looking for the baddest-assed dentist possible, please accept my highest possible recommendation for Dr. Gordon Roznik. Don’t worry, he doesn’t go by “The Roz,” that’s just what me and the Piemaker (another patient) call him. The staff crack up every time too–”the Roz told me to check and see if I have enough insurance left for a deep cleaning.” Anyway, love The Roz. I had to take down the video I had up here–I couldn’t figure out how to keep it from playing by itself all the time, it was driving me nuts.

I have talked about my friend Dylan Chorneau on this blog before, but I love him so much I’d like to do it again.

Dylan is a photographer, but he’s more importantly an image-maker, a distinction that gets lost sometimes I think. It is easy for uneducated dummies like me, and even regular-ole educated dummies, to forget that photography is a science and discipline and an artform, not just a legion of high-school students taking pictures of stairwells and ashtrays and elbows.

To strip the label even further, let’s call Dylan just a maker, like many of us with a hard-to-satisfy creative passion. We make things, we construct them, we arrange and build and tear down and rearrange until we are satisfied, though we are rarely satisfied. We are engineers and architects, sonata and sonnet writers, painters and photographers. We are often many of these at the same time.

I was looking at some of Dylan’s photos one time and made a comment about one of them being unflattering to a friend of ours–she’s a beautiful woman, so it really stuck out. Dylan looked at me like I had grown a second nose beside the first. “I’m not interested in making people look good,” he said, “as much as I am in making pictures look good.”  Dylan is just as comfortable talking about apertures and light meters as he is Velazquez and Van Eyck. He could talk for hours about Rembrandt’s “light sculpting” technique, or baking the perfect pizza crust, or his son’s first potty-training victory.

I’ve known Dylan since we were both teenagers, we entered adulthood together, I was lucky to be the best man at his wedding. It is inspiring to be around him, his restless creativity gets my own fired-up, knocks the ideas loose from the various stalactites and recesses of my brain. Over just the last couple of years he’s moved into photography, and is already ridiculously skilled at it. I would love to see him get rich from it too. I am super ready to show up Entourage-style for some of that money.

You can see a wild plethora of Dylan’s photos and paintings on his Flickr page. Enjoy yourself!

Guys, have you seen this yet? Part of some nutty Cartoon Network “Cartoonstitute” program? Like a little think-tank for new animators? Maybe? Anyway, watch this, it’s good all the way til the end:

GOOD MORNING!!

Today is Free Comic Book Day, and to celebrate, I stayed out super late last night at a Rolling Stones tribute I barely watched any of. EXCELLENT PLAN, DHARBIN! So, as I type this before going into work for the enormous Free Comic Book Day jamboree at Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find, I am looking and feeling my best.

BUT! There is a silver lining: today “The Ancient Age” is available for free from Wide Awake Press. It’s something like a NINETY-PAGE comics anthology, with a pretty dizzying level of quality. J. Chris Campbell has really outdone himself with this one, and I am ever-so proud to have been included. I have an 8-page story set in Ancient Rome called “The Under-Achiever,” but it’s kinda hard to read at the size it displays at on the site. Soon I think a downloadable .pdf will be available, so you can zoom in to your heart’s content. And I even think J. Chris is going to do a print version at some point, so you can then OWN IT! Regardless of the size of my story, the rest of the book is insanely good anyway, so go enjoy yourself. I’ve only flipped through it as I try to drink this coffee without throwing it up everywhere, but so far the Corinne Mucha and Pat Lewis stories are especially delicious-seeming. Pat Lewis is a drawing machine.

Okay! Off to work and Free Comic Book Day!

Do you know what Partyka is?  I do:  terrific, that’s what.  This month I’ve been invited, in a display of flattery the world has not seen since The Supreme Court elected George W. Bush president, to be Guest Artist at Partyka, which is super awesome. 

My little mini-residency is going to be a group of drawings I’m calling “WHAT HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE,” totalling 12 drawings and 12 different versions of the word “HEAVEN.”  I think my man J. Chris Campbell is going to turn this into a sweet Wide Awake Press minicomic in time for FLUKE, which I’ll be attending as well.  Oh, did I mention I was attending FLUKE this year?

But back to Partyka.  The site is run mainly by Shawn Cheng and Matt Wiegle, both of whom have got a ton of sweet minicomics to their credit(s), all of which you should go and buy immediately.  I used one of each of their minicomics in the class I just finished teaching on comics, mainly as examples of how singular and special a minicomic can be. 

Here’s one of my favorite Matt Wiegle drawings:

I love it!  And for even more color chicanery, Shawn Cheng:

Whoa Nellie!  These guys were either very nice or very foolish or both to have invited me onto their site, but either way I’m excited to be there.  I’m also looking forward to seeing them at TCAF (Toronto Comic Arts Festival) in May.  Oh, did I not mention I was going to be a guest at TCAF?  Oops!  Okay, but let’s focus on Partyka for right now, alright?  You can visit my (still nascent) guest page here!

Courtesy of the fine group of Canadians (O Canada!) that run the endlessly interesting DRAWN! blog, I just enjoyed this video while finishing up my lunch with some delicioius Baked Ruffles Cheddar & Sour Cream flavored chips. I suspect that the video is delightful no matter what chips you choose to enjoy it with:

Also recently profiled on DRAWN! is good ole Joe Lambert, one of my very favorite cartoonists. Joe may seem like the kind of guy you’d pair with salt & vinegar chips, but I’m thinking actually he’s 100% Ritz Crackers.

Dylan Chorneau is one of my oldest and best friends in the world, and about as close as you can get to a brother without being one, speaking as someone with two actual “real” brothers. I have a pretty tremendous group of friends, not only for just being sweet people, but for being ridiculously talented. But even in this impressive group, Dylan stands out as a guy who’s just DRIPPING with raw talent. Dylan’s the kind of guy who just has a lot of talent lying around in little piles on the floor, and occasionally will decide he wants to pick some of it up and shape it into something. And so he does.

Case in point: I’m not even mentioning the fact that Dylan is an incredible painter who works in pretty much any medium he can find, and can talk to you without blinking about the various methods of the Dutch masters or Velazquez, for hours. Okay, so I just mentioned it; but the point is that I’m ONLY focusing on his photography here, and I think he’s only been taking pictures in an applied way for the last year or so, give or take.

The one at the top is a portrait he recently took of another friend of ours’ children. I mean, look at it. Jeez Louise. Especially if you knew these kids–the idea that they stood this still for ANYthing is pretty extraordinary. But even better is the looks on their faces. These kids have some pretty magic DNA running in their veins already, and Dylan caught some of it here. He’s the kind of guy who approaches a portrait as a PORTRAIT, which I don’t think many people do anymore.

So for the last several months, Dylan’s been carrying this medium-format camera around with him, and he’ll just stand around and quietly snap pictures of people. The camera itself is a curiosity not only because of its shape and deceptive “old-timiness”, but because it lacks something that every other camera and phone in the world, or at least in most bars, etc., lacks: a digital screen on the back where the subject can IMMEDIATELY check out how they look. And/or criticize the picture: “Oh, you gotta delete that one, you gotta delete it. Let me try again.”

So it makes it even more remarkable when, a couple of weeks later (after he’s actually DEVELOPED THE FILM [???!!???]), one of these little photos will appear on Flickr. The fellow above is named Keith; Dylan and I talked to him at a New Year’s Eve party, and when Dylan took his picture, he made that face. It takes a certain kind of dude to wear that expression for a picture at a New Year’s Eve party, and I only point that out because Keith was super friendly, and Dylan and I talked to him for awhile.  But the weird thing is, Dylan took ONE picture. ONE! And it came out. That’s the kind of dude Dylan is, maybe (that’s him, below).  Dylan Chorneau is a one-click dude.

So anyway, Dylan is, in the words of Charles Bukowski, “my buddy out of nowhere,” and I thought I’d sing his praises a little bit. It’s certainly more fun to talk nice about my friends than most other things I could write about. Check out his Flickr stream for dozens more pictures, most of which are just as nice as these. And if you snoop around a little, or just click this link, you’ll come across some of his paintings, which are equally if not more amazing. You may thank me below.

My intense love for this cartoon makes me want to make some pretty hyperbolic statements. Even now, even two sentences in, I’m still struggling. It’s too hard for me to separate in my mind the INTENSE nostalgia and just… satisfaction this thing brings out in me, from a more critical (and still satisfied) adult perspective.

For one thing, and in a somewhat bizarre but entirely appropriate coincidence, I’m finishing Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem right now, which is all about causality, quantum theory, polycosmic so-and-so. So it’s hard to watch a cartoon that is, at its heart, a long sequence of cause-and-effect events, strung together over one of the funkiest backbeats I think I’ve ever heard.  It’s hard to imagine the novel and the cartoon being any more different, but if I could include both in a mixtape, well…  But I’ll say more about Anathem in another post.  I’m having enough trouble describing this cartoon.

While its usually hard to remember how something felt when you were a kid, I can watch this and instantly go back to seeing it 30 years ago, marvelling at how right each successive event was.  While I don’t have OCD, I do take intense, often time-consuming and distracting pleasure in organizing things, filling out forms, basically putting things in their places.  And while I’ve never really enjoyed getting high, going “out of my head”, et cetera, when I was a kid this was like getting high to me.  This cartoon was like an OCD birthday party:  basically dozens of shots of things happening JUST BECAUSE, the way they were supposed to, the ball each time finding its way into its various temporary homes. 

WHAT IN THE WORLD was the chain of events that created this cartoon?  Besides the animation itself, right out of some back page in The Push Pin Graphic, there’s that extraordinarily funky music.  Is that the funkiest backbeat ever?  Hard to say, but GOOD GOD, I can’t get it out of my head.  I don’t want to get it out of my head.  Can you imagine being part of the group of people that made this?  Sitting around the table saying, “and then a monkey jumps out of the elephant and tees the ball up; maybe Teddy Roosevelt can catch the ball in his mouth?”  Someone in the comment section at the Youtube post says that it’s THE POINTER SISTERS singing?  If this came out today, it would cost 20 million dollars, win an Oscar, and launch its own line of merchandise.  But in the 70’s it was just 2 minutes and 42 seconds on The Electric Company (or Sesame Street, maybe both), broadcast to a bunch of 4 year olds, each of whom stored the memory somewhere deep and secret, to be unearthed and treasured periodically for the rest of their lives.

Unearth this:  the last 10 seconds of the thing MIGHT be among my favorite pieces of art of all time.  I know, it’s crazy.  But if you judge art based on its power to inspire, to mystify, and most of all TO PLEASE, something about the end of this cartoon hits me deep, somewhere in my lizard brain.  Almost as if I’ve been there, almost as if I’ll be back soon. 

TWELVE!

Aaron Renier made me do it:

Merry Christmas, Internet!