I Didn’t Want To Draw David Bowie Today.  I Don’t Feel Capable Of Accurately Portraying Anything

Callie and Izzy is an upcoming webseries it’s been my pleasure to be part of.  The show is by Nicola Rose, with whom I’ve previously worked on The Media Show and the musical Aisle Six.

More info coming soon, keep an eye on it!

This past Wednesday I volunteered to add something unique to the thank-you gifts we gave to Off the Hook listeners who pledged their support during our final fundraising episode of the season.  During the show I drew a series of telephones, all different, all off the hook, one after another in a live marathon.  Everyone who donated to WBAI during the show's live broadcast will be receiving a random one of these.

This was lots of fun.  I did better than I thought I might both time and quality wise, and the fundraising was successful with many awesome folks supporting our listener-funded exploits.

You can listen to the episode by going to this archive page and selecting the May 18, 2011 link.

Signed, dated, and numbered series. Archival ink on heavy paper, 7x10".

Studio photos by Mike, first-five photo by dot.ret

Stromberg-Carlson upright phone 1894

When Alexander Graham Bell’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894, American Bell Telephone Company employees Alfred Stromberg and Androv Carlson went into the telephone-manufacturing business for themselves.

The telephone shown here is Stromberg-Carlson’s first upright desk phone, nicknamed "the Coffee Grinder" by enthusiasts due to its unusual shape and side-mounted hand crank.  Few of these unique members of the "candlestick phone" family survive today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Some more captchart.  The 1963 Wostro, the herpderpiest automobile the swinging sixties and a wonky captcha had to offer!

Public domain source images: 1 2 3 4 5 6

The President's Red Phone

The Moscow-Washington hotline which existed during the mid-20th-century Cold War was a teletype-based affair, not a telephone, but that didn't stop the imagined concept of a red emergency phone in the White House catching on in popular culture.  One example of this is the Red Phone's starring role in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; indeed, the film's Spanish title is ¿Teléfono rojo?, volamos hacia Moscú, which means “Red Telephone?  We're Flying to Moscow.”

The iconic “Red Phone” image continues to grip the public imagination today, appearing regularly in fiction, art, and even Presidential campaign ads.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Me as world-renowned and universally-beloved superhero, Italian Spiderman. Unfamiliar?  Watch this, read this.

Thrift shop clothes: $8

Fabric paint: $5

Cut-up cat mask: $6

Bagged wig: $10

Dodgy pornstache: model's own

Unlimited admiration and caffè macchiato from every woman who happened to glance in my direction: senza prezzo

Photo by Sidepocket

Today’s daily doodle was a race against myself, in just under three minutes I drew a pinback button which happened to be sitting on my desk.

Linus Torvalds (b. December 28, 1969)

Finnish-American software engineer Linus Torvalds is the founding developer of Linux, a free and open-source operating system kernel which led to countless implementations and derivatives and grew into the system driving an ever-increasing amount of public, professional, and private computing work.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

A rough Doctor Who sketch from 2000 or 2001, done to stave off the boredom of the retail job I had back then.  I wasn't allowed to nap, so the Doctor got to instead.

I sketched this clandestinely behind the store's counter in black ballpoint.  This scan is color-corrected to counteract the old cheap ink having gone a bit violet over the years.  Around 9x6".

chiaestevez:

I definitely put my faith in Blast Hardcheese. 

I made this remix at least 100 years ago, it never fails to make me happy that other folks keep circulating it, making it into videos like this, etc.  It's the reason I ended up choosing the domain SpaceMutiny.com for my music.