Tag Archives: VW

Father, Son and holy price break!

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HAL is finally an "ACTUAL ON BOARD COMPUTER"...as he was always intended to be.

I actually started thinking about getting some sort of WESTFALIA last summer.  I am not sure if was reading KOOK or the weather or what but back then I knew I needed a change automotivly.  When I looked at the prices on CRAIGSLIST though I was freaking shocked.  WESTYs seem to have become the GRATEFUL DEAD of four wheeled vehicles, a true, honest-to-the-gawds cult vehicle.  That put them out of my price range of course (always costs a lot to belong to a cult these days)…until the deal for Testy the WESTY came about.  Sure she needs some love…ok she need a whole lotta love…but I am amazed at how driving an old Wolfsburg product has changed my attitude.  I have taken to in the afternoon at the office to sneak out to the Van for a half an hour to write or draw or read or think.  WiFi in downtown Palo Alto is not hard to come by if you know how to park so I am test driving the whole “Mobile studio” concept.

Like a good hobby Testy the WESTY has turned on the “dollar store pack rat” in me as well.  Some people collect stuffed bears or back issues of old magazine or porcelain clowns (Ok those people need to seek professional help!).  I seek out little things that will make my new mobile studio more habitable and in line with my “writer/artist on the move” lifestyle.  That, combined with my new desire to “listen to my inner Scotsman” (as Dr. Norm the Rock Climbing Physist has taught me) leads to new avenues of entertainment.

Today for example, I needed to replace the roll up iPhone charging cord I carrying in one of the pouches of my computer backpack so I went to CENTRAL COMPUTING, which is just around the corner from me on El Camino Real.  If you have never been, and you are either a geek or a cheap bastard (or both) then treat yourself.

There is a scene in NEUROMANCER where Molly takes Case on a Cyberspace Cowboy shopping spree to get the equipment for THE STRAYLIGHT RUN.  In my imagination they would have gone to a future version of CENTRAL COMPUTING.  All the cheap (but workman like and functional) Chinese and “almost out of date” computer crap you can imagine.  Metal shelves piled high with boxes covered with alien creatures from video games you have never heard of, hard drives stacked up like Dove Bars behind glass, shrink wrapped things with too many cords that only leave you to wonder what they were for and why anyone would need to replace one. I sometimes just wander the isles and admire the confluence of computers and the dollar store. In an earlier incarnation I was “too good” for the place, now it is a haven of air conditioning and the smell of off gassing Chinese plastic.

Today was a good day for me though because not only did I find my retractable iPhone charge cord ($5.95) but I also found a cool suction cup arm that fits perfectly between the winscreen and the instrument cluster.  Add to these fact that it fit into my “holy Trinity” of purchases, it was a true “Techno-Westy-cheap” sort of purchase.  Like a 12 year old I couldn’t wait to get out to Testy and install the arm.  I figured that if I stayed in the parking lot to test it, and it was crap, return was a simple thing.  Luckily it worked brilliant, attaching the iPhone in a comfortable location like a control pod in a Syd Mead shuttle.  My “Solos ship” comes more into focus.  COOL!

 

Back to the Drawing Board

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Grom angry, wedgie chafe Grom

For awhile there I had an almost infinite amount of free time on my hands, so you could probably visualize a halcyon artistic existence.  The artist (moi) sipping absinthe and telling his beautiful model to move her hair aside as it’s flowing golden locks was obscuring the tantalizing curve of her perfect breasts.  You might imagine that…if the crack you are smoking is berry BERRY Powerful.  The thing is that Absinthe costs money and beautiful models cost money (and usually a part of your soul).  In this post out-sourcing world where companies that once touted themselves as “Rebels who support the artistic vision of the people who work for them” suddenly start looking for those people in MALAYSIA so they can pay them less art is, in fact, just another job, one that is hard to come by  if you live in California.  What was once merely “competitive” is now truly “cut-throat”.

I know a lot of artists who do just fine under the kind of pressure that comes with being out of work.  Most of them though have some sort of support structure that helps them deal with the day to day expenses until they can get back into a studio or find a job at STARBUCKS.  Since I was bereft of such a support structure I got stressed and when I get stressed I lose my creativity like a set of keys in a couch, I know it is there but I just cannot find it to save my life.

Do these speedos make Groms Butt look big?

So for a long time I caught myself in a “Catch 22″.  To make the kind of money I really am capable of I need to be creative but the pressures of NOT making any money made my creativity run and hide (see above).  What to do?  Well it was simple.  Day Job For The Win.  Unfortunately I was in the Silicon Valley, the place with the highest unemployment in California, and it took some time to find a niche where I could work.

There is a happy ending though, I have reached equilibrium again and the creative impulse is finally starting to return.  I am not sure if getting a VW back into my life is responsible in part but oddly he seems like it is.  When I was sleeping in the WESTY over the weekend, with the conveniently level table and the inherent privacy I was suddenly smitten with the desire to…well to do art. Clever Germans! (If only they knew how to deal with the whole “comedy thing” as well as not talking themselves out of relationships)

I find myself being drawn back into zBrush because I have an idea for a way to use it in Conjunction with ANIMATE to crank out video faster.  I have always loved mixing it up with media and this is an avenue I want to explore more extensively.  I initially got the idea as a way of doing a web series based on BUCKY STARR, SPACED CADET. It is going to take some of my newly developed time management skills, because after the Drive -By relationship I got out of the habit of going to the gym and that has to change as well, so there will be some rearranging of priorities and such but hey who needs sleep after all?

Monday Morning Video -Changed my life

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Why the big suit?

First of multiple posts today as it is paste up week here at DogBrain Studios.  I ran out to get some grub for the next few days and was surprised to hear this song come on the radio…which flashed me back to another time and a different car radio when the same thing occured.  The difference is that when it happened before it changed my life.

I was just out of college, not because I had graduated but rather because I had gotten a job in my field at that time (graphic Design/printing/reprography) working the graveyard shift at a commercial printing house.  I had just come off a week of days where “graveyard shift” started at noon and ended at the normal 3 AM as the company that owned the print facility was getting ready for CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). When deadlines like that are set in place the production people find themselves at the mercy of executives and senior designers.  That means endless revisions, confusing changes and late nights to make up for mistakes that inevitably occur.

At the same time I was working at this printing facility I was doing the Science Fiction convention circuit on the West Coast, often 6 shows a year, trying to get a toehold in the illustration business.  This also meant long hours and little time for what most people call “a life”. I worked most of the time, one way or another, an unfortunate habit I developed during that time and which later led to problems for me (read : “melt down”).Understand that this was during the time that I was not involved in racing at all.  I had realized that I was not going to make it as a professional driver, no connections or cash, so I had gone back to school to learn a trade.  Originally I was majoring in Video Production but those jobs were few and far between at that time, mostly due to the fact that video camera were somewhere in the neighborhood of a small car when it came to price and editing suites were the size of Peterbilts. This led me back to Design/printing/reprography, which was were I was working at the moment of which I am speaking.

The best way to describe my feelings about everything at that time was frustrated.  I wasn’t going anywhere in the direction I wanted to go (illustration). The job I had was paying good for the time period but it showed signs of rapidly developing into a dead end.  I was an ambitious young turk with everything to prove and I wanted more.  Hell I had even rationalized quitting racing because it “wasn’t important”, as if I was destined to cure cancer or bring world peace to all mankind. The arrogance of youth combined with this ambition to turn me into a malcontent in training, destined one day to sit at the lunchroom table of the print shop where I had been working for 20 years with my gut resting on my knees whilst I sipped coffee and told the younger guys I had a great life.

As I turned onto the freeway a bright light flashed in my eyes, rheumy with lack of sleep, stinging them and blinding me. The burgeoning curmudgeon in me uttered an oath about the light and said out loud:

“…someone ought to do something about that damn thing!”

The “thing” in question was the sun and I realized suddenly that I had worked 20 hours straight and there was no traffic because I was going counter commute, it being the morning rush hour and I was just heading home from work. (I love telling this story because the present day me has a good laugh at the younger me, knowing full well that the younger me would not have been able to take the kidding)

Muzzy as I was I needed something to keep awake/alive until I got back to Arden Way, where I was living with my girl friend at that time. Bombing down the road in my 1962 VW Beetle (Socrates by name) I reached for the AUDIOVOX.  The first chords of the original recording of this song were just winding up.

In other cultures there are men who seek enlightenment through mind expanding quests.  These often include exhaustion as a primary component.  When you exhaust your body to the edge of endurance it pulls back the veil of everyday pretense that binds us and blinds us from truths as obvious as a heart attack when gazed upon at face value. Bushmen in Australia go WALKABOUT, Polynesian mariner set out into vast oceanic deserts in small open craft, native Americans go into a sweat lodges and slough off all their pretense through sweltering heat and peyote. In America we take ourselves to the edge through different forms of excess, some recreational and some which come out of a bottle. In this case I had reached that receptive juncture through a week of exhaustive work at the print shop.  My mind was open for the message that I was to perceive in the TALKING HEADS song, ONCE IN A LIFETIME.  Watch the video and listen to the words and imagine yourself in a rattling VW on a cool morning when you could barely stay awake.

It had a serious effect on me . Within a month I left the print shop to live off my girl friend, who would later become my wife, and what savings I had so I could throw myself whole heatedly into my work. I painted morning to late into the night, drank gallons of coffee and rarely went out (or wore anything but a jumpsuit my Dad had bought for me that was festooned with embroidered patches from great european automobile marques). I dedicated myself completely to my art. Soon I would move to Los Angeles and spend a year or two trying to get into the new COMPUTER GRAPHICS field at a company called DIGITAL PRODUCTIONS. I would live a bohemian life where everyone and everything around me was a function of my works and my desire to succeed. When I dedicate myself to a task in that manner I accomplish great things, sometimes at great cost but I was young and inexperienced and had a lot to learn.

How did you spend 1985