this is what concerns me:

The Animation Show #4 is coming! (It’ll hit the Bay Area this Friday, at the Lumiere in San Francisco, and the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley).

I remember seeing the very first Animation Show debut in Campbell Hall (in 2003? that era is a bit hazy). Don H. and the other UCSB alums who did his voiceovers gave a great intro and took questions afterwards. (I still have my Animation Show T-shirt from that year’s Comic-Con!)

It was happier times, I guess — ’cause now Don Hertzfeldt isn’t associated with the show he co-founded, like, at all. From his Bitter Films blog, in March:

last week i decided it was time for me to part ways with the animation show. it’s been five years and three tours and some good memories. they have a new tour rolling through theaters this summer and i don’t know what will be in it but i encourage you to go check it out

The show is now entirely curated by Mike Judge. And, uh, you know how I feel about that dude.

Mostly I’m just annoyed that I’ll have to pay two (2!!) admission fees to see both AS#4 and Hertzfeldt’s upcoming i am so proud of you, the follow-up to AS#3’s everything will be ok. Disappointing all around.

Blah blah MoCCA was supersweet blah blah.

On his process: “Sometimes I just sit on the couch, and if I look out the window and see a fat guy with bloody knuckles and curlers in his hair spitting, I start to think, ‘Wow, what does that guy do for a living? What do his kids look like?’ It just happens like that.”

The third volume of the excellent reportage comics anthology Syncopated is debuting in a couple weeks. I wrote an article and illustrated an illustration for this volume — it is otherwise crammed full of excellent talents. And we all know that comics + excellent talents = free beer! I’m third down, third across. Hope you can make it! except if you don’t like comics, talents and/or beer, in which case you should just stay home. And maybe stop reading this blog.

Sorry, folks, I’ve just been distracted by other pursuits. But I’ll be back very shortly with tales of transcontinental air transit, kitchen-related injuries by way of indulgent desserts, New York art shows, sketchbook follies and general hard-knock stories about being a Crown Heights, Brooklyn freelancing shut-in. See, so much to come! For now, though, I’ll leave you with these gooey tiramisu cupcakes from VCTOW.

click and they shall grow. just a little, though.

For Anthem July/August ‘07. I know the date is wrong. This is for clippy purposes.

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This summer, don’t be surprised to discover a whole new kind of well-manicured bush at the Grove in LA–in the sumptuous coffee table erotica at the new Taschen store. The 550 square foot shop, located in the center’s clock tower, will provide a shock of sexy technicolor to the shopping playground of starched white collars from the O.C. to Porn Valley.

Another retail outpost in Los Angeles ain’t no thing for power-publisher Benedikt Taschen–it’s just another notch in his beautiful belt. Taschen has come a long way from its 82 square foot comics shop in Cologne, Germany: the Grove location will be the third LA store for the best-known name in art book publishing.

For those who aren’t too embarrassed to buy their vintage porn and Dali in one fell swoop, the pristine Philippe Starck-designed shop will specialize in affordable tomes, mostly under $50 a pop. Starck calls Taschen “political” for its down-market tack on the traditionally bougie art book industry. Hopefully they’ll be keeping late hours this summer, because as any good plebe knows, there’s nothing better than winding down with free air conditioning and Inside Cuba after a long day of working for the man.

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Contrary to popular opinion, I am indeed still alive.

The last month or so I’ve taken a break from the internet more or less and I apologize to any of you that I’ve resultingly blown off. The internet and I have been close for over a decade now, and I felt like I just needed a break from the relationship – it was getting a little intense there for a while.

So it goes.

This past week my friends from college Ari and Adam came to visit and crash at Top Floor while on their two month cross-country road trip. The road trip is ostensibly an exploration of drive in movie theatres across America, their death and resurgence, and their impact on and reflection of the changing culture. As they’ve been progressing through (about halfway through), Ari and Adam have altered their focus somewhat, to include more of themselves and their own experience as well. This is what Ari and I got into a somewhat antagonistic on-film conversation about when the boys were staying (in the visionary, of course).

I should say: I love first person journalism. It acknowledges the greatest human truth: no matter how hard you try, you can’t go beyond yourself; you are in everything you do. There’s a personality invested in the story, instead of surreptitiously (and sometimes dishonestly) hidden behind the material.

But there is, of course, a line between being a part of the story and becoming the story. I’ll call this the Thompson line. Hunter was an excellent documenter, but his Gonzo predilections often won out over his journalistic ones, leading him to purposefully alter the story to make it more exciting.

This is part of what concerns me about Ari and Adam drive in documentary. The other part is the narcissism, which I’ll call the MySpace syndrome (alternatives: Reality television and/or the blogosphere).The drifting, ambivalent neo-nihilist/alarmingly sincere twixter experience is a trendy and marginally interesting one (and you must agree at least a bit, considering you’re reading my blog.) But, you know. There are limits.

Incidentally, my other advice to Ari and Adam was to make their blog entries shorter and less rambling. So, a grain of salt.

So it goes.