Spring please now thanks.

It's strange to go into a grocery store and be aware of the consumer demographic the place is targeting. Yesterday, I went to Foodland in what I guess is north Charleston. The frozen foods section was bigger than the produce section, and the frozen desserts section was even bigger than that. There were two whole aisles of candy. Country music piped through the store speakers. As I drew my conclusions about all these observations, I started to feel unbearably self-conscious about myself. What is my target demographic? Anyhow, the store did have RAMPS, which I can't even find at the farmer's market.
The Foodland in Kanawha City plays old-timey 40's music, they keep a real butcher on staff during the day, and it's full of old people. Asshole place on Corridor G sells sushi, wine, and fancy soap, and it's full of assholes (aaand some nice people, including me..buying sushi..sometimes.)

I finished my design for the East End Streetworks banner project. I have no idea if it's what they were looking for, or had in mind, but it's "my interpretation" of the east end...
Beginning sketch:


Finished Product:

AMNATION!

I made this animation a couple years ago when I first started working at the TV station. It seems pretty chunky n choppy to me now, and the style is so underdeveloped, but watching it makes me want to do something like this again..only better!
Does it not make you want to watch TV and dream of the beach? I seem to have invoked Havana in the 50's as a representation of Sawgrass resort in Florida. hmmm...

old time

1/2 hour documentary by John Nakashima for WV Pulblic Broadcasting. Appalachian Stringband Music Festival, or Clifftop, is a weeklong party I go to every year.
That's me and our band's awesome banjo picker, Chad, at 20:38. yay!

spring is here, cornchips and beer

Piping Hot

Chemistry is often called on to heal the rift between body and soul. The relief that people that people express when a doctor says their depression is "chemical" is predicated on a belief that there is an integral self that exists across time, and on a fictional divide between the fully occasioned sorrow and the utterly random one. The word chemical seems to assuage people of the feeling of responsibility for the stressed-out discontent of not liking their jobs, worrying about getting old, failing at love, hating their families. There is a pleasant freedom from guilt that has been attached to chemical. If your brain is predisposed to depression, you need not blame yourself for it. Well, blame yourself or evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, and that happiness too, is chemical. Chemistry and biology are not matters that impinge on the "real" self; depression cannot be separated from the person it affects. Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bring you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small degree who you are.

--Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

bone & key

detail of vanitas...
it's stylistically different from the rest of the painting. it should be it's own little painting...yeah.