KL Poetry Cup, MAP KL 8/28/10

The World is Being Ripped © 1985 by Seth Tobocman

This monkey see - monkey do scene here is the front cover of my 36th sketchbook, which I finished this month. I have studied painting while in art school during the late eighties, but decided later that my paintings were drawings pretending to be paintings. Nowadays I hardly ever paint, except on the covers of my sketchbooks - for which, I must admit have something of a fetish. The canvas structure is always inviting enough to do something like this in acrylics. As a side note, this design is likely to become the cover of my next book with Le Dernier Cri, hopefully to be printed in 2011.

Japan-Malaysia video art Xchange, National Art Gallery, 7/31/10

home sweet home

home sweet home, première mise en ligne par Gaiihin\\\\\Yogœme.

Sickl Open Lab 12, SICKL, 8/13/10

(click above for link)

RAGs film report part 2: Shuji Terayama

My summer holiday just finished, but in the first week of it, I finished watching all the movies on my list to keep clear the rest of the holiday for other things, I dont want to watch movies again til the end of the year. I watched 45 movies that week! I did nothing else, usually 6 movies a day. So I'll try to pick up again even though the last post was months ago.

I cant remember quite how I found out about him but Shuji Terayama is a neglected arthouse director whose time will come eventually for revival in interest and reissues, because there is extremely little of his work on dvd or even vhs. The only thing I could get on dvd that interested me was Grass Labyrinth in the erotic anthology film Private Collections and these are screenshots I taken from it, the Grass Labyrinth section is now on Youtube, so is his extremely contoversial film Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which inspired the title of a Stereolab album and is notorious for scenes of young children simulating sex with older women, so be careful if you watch it! It even got some scary imdb users saying they wanted to kill him for making this film, but he is already dead.

He was involved in all sorts of professions, including horse racing commentating and made some highly regarded progressive rock albums that are also hard to find. To be honest, I'm not that interested in the political commentary of his work, but his films have some great imagery, the pictures I taken from Grass Labyrinth only represent a small part of the film. Here is some more nice imagery, much like Suehiro Maruo...

Summoning an Abomination

Summoning an Abomination, originally uploaded by SEAN ÄABERG.

Illustration for a secret project. The central form is Cthulhu, except it's still a bit too "describable" for me, it's difficult to render something which is undescribable, but i did my best.

BUGSVILLE

I had this strange idea for a story involving a fantasy world where humans coexist alongside grotesquely large insects set in the 1940's. Many of them are human sized and seemingly as intelligent as people. There would be slums in cities where David Cronenberg esque insect creatures live like second class citizens, selling illegal substances made from bizarre secretions. I pictured an opium bar except instead of opium it's humans/insects coming to drink brownish liquid fed through long tubes connected to the walls, on the other side the tubes are attached to large insects. I was thinking how the cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit lived in semi seclusion from humans and like that movie, there would be bugs of all sizes, trying to live like humans and adapting to their architectural environments. Distrct 9 would be a good visual example I suppose.

It's all a weird blur of scenes/ideas in my head but I think the story would be some sort of murder mystery/psychological thriller. There would be a human who has to go into the insect slums to find information on a murder, spy on the underground insect activities, drug makings, something like that. I'm thinking of insects that take humans into sewers and create hives filled with their corpses for their larvae to feed on. Could be a war between human mafia and insect gangs. I'm picturing flies the size of cars buzzing out of the slums in the middle of the night to break into the top story of a skyscraper where a human mafia boss lives to threaten him to leave their turf alone, stop taking cuts from their insect drug trade, stuff like that.

The first image in my head of this crazy fantasy world was a man dressed in 1940's attire walking down a street near the insect slums, he passes an insect meat market that has dozens of weird insects cut up, hanging on display, floating in jars. Then he steps onto a bus, except the bus is actually a giant hollowed out centipede that crawls along the street next to cars.

Anyway, I can see a lot of potential for it, guess I'll let it fester in my brains for awhile. If I didn't have a million other things going on right now this idea would be a lot of fun to turn into a graphic novel.

MEGA MALL VIDEO GAME

MEGA MALL VIDEO GAME, originally uploaded by SEAN ÄABERG.

So, my video game is advancing. It is shaping up into MEGA MALL. where you play Uzi Reptoid in the MEGA MALL, which might be on a space ship deep in space, not sure yet. In each shop is a different game & in some shops are arcades with lots of smaller games. GAME GAME GAME. All computer bleeps & bloops by Richard Hofmeier.

REJECTED!!!!

Well, I kinda knew it would be. I strayed too far from the original so Robert at Covered couldn't use it, so that's that.

Oh, well.

RPG illustrations

I haven't done RPG illustrations for a while so it was fun to do around 30 drawings for two separate games recently, a somewhat pulpy sci-fi game and a slightly less pulpy fantasy game.

Decompose!

I just found a drawing I did in 1986 based on this show. I might scan it and post it, but in the meantime, enjoy at least the opening intro to this classic animated Saturday morning toy commercial.

Three Posts in Less Than A Month? What the Hell?

Here's a piece that I did a little while ago that I'm finally able to post now that it's gone online elsewhere. This was a piece I was commissioned to do for Pete Graham's Tennis vs Apocalypse Blog, and I had a fucking blast doing it. I hadn't used paint/done a piece in traditional media for probably 4 years maybe? Check out the blog, there's tons of fucking awesome art for a bunch of bitchen artists (like EBD contributor Matthew Allison)!

Space Family Robinson #50

I had a new cover go up on the Covered! Blog today! This time around I chose a very strange Space Family Robinson cover that I had previously seen on Monster Brains. Check it out!

Original:
My Version:

Whiteaker Block Party Guide Covers

The neighborhood i live in in Eugene, Oregon is its first & only "cool" neighborhood. BIG QUOTATION MARKS, but it's cool for Eugene, Oregon. Anyhow, some of the people who make it cool (& some of the people who make it not cool) put on a big Block Party every year & this year i got roped into doing a bunch of art for it, including the map for the guide which is tied into a local mag Boozeweek. Here are my alternate covers.

Mountain Light deck state 1

Center part of the skate deck tryptych from the sketches I uploaded yesterday.

New ink "WestHouse"

This is the first in an upcoming group of inks. What inspired this series is night-time driving through suburbia of NJ that we would pass on our way to Conn. The industrial parks and the corporate pavilions. I find those places very strange. I always imagined they are self-enclosed worlds filled with strangeness and strange rituals. Or that there is some sort of alien task force, building some machine. Truly I was also inspired by the "laziness" of suburbia. Somehow, I find all that connecting to a slow degenerative collapse of our civilization.

Skate Deck Sketches

Starting to work on some skate deck designs.

Nightspirit spake me TINNITUS

I listened to Emperor's Anthems To Welkin At Dusk in Febuary and it was the first time I've loved a metal album as much as one of my favorite dreampop albums( I only own less than 30 metal albums so far, I'm still a beginner really). I had already been blown away by In The Nightside Eclipse a year before but this really moved me incredibly, I have never heard a group of people this unbelievably ALIVE before.

But I ended up turning it up louder and louder on my headphones, so it was the loudest I'd ever heard anything till the drumming really beat the shit out of my ears, but I was enjoying way to much to turn it down, enjoying it so much I'd even call it a highlight in lifetime this far. Inspired me incredibly, made dreams come true of images I have always longed for. And on that pulverising volume I listened to it twice in a row and I got Tinnitus from it.

I have a relatively light case of Tinnitus, but it was difficult to accept for the first few months, but I can ignore it fairly well now. But I'm just warning you that it can happen easier than you think, I mostly listen to soft music, only 10% of my listening is extreme music and I never thought this could happen to me.

But still...HAIL EMPEROR!!! I've only got one more album and some EPs to listen to and then off to solo stuff and offshoot bands.

Statue of Death

Digital composition that will be rendered in black and white charcoal on paper soon.