So you want to be a book author ...

Here's a website with lots of information about how to become an author from someone who's struggled and won. I'd start with the free PDF e-book. Like many successful authors, JA Konrath started out with 500 rejections. Sound familiar? Yep, like the kind of writing we're more familiar with, it's a time and persistence thing. So be not discouraged, be busy.

12 tips for managing your information footprint

What can people find out about you online? How can you try to control it? This list is a good place to start. The article it links to, "What the Web knows about you," is excellent further reading.

Frank Frazetta, Rough Work

Boingboing has some page shots of Frazetta's sketchbook book, which is still availalble in bookstores and quite reasonably priced.

Hardcover: 128 pages
Publisher: Spectrum Fantastic Art; 1st Hardcover Ed edition (September 28, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1599290138
ISBN-13: 978-1599290133
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches

Amazon has it at US$13.57 for example.

New airbrush book: Overspray

This is a luscious coffee-table dominator full of glossy eye-candy from California. It's not a how-to book, it's a celebration of four great artists' work. Plenty of good visuals on their website too.

"Overspray is the comprehensive account of the rise of airbrush art, and of the equally bright and glossy Los Angeles culture in which it flourished during the 1970s. Inspired by surf graphics, psychedelia and Hollywood glitz, a generation of young artists made every lip and palm tree glisten, and every record cover slick as a well?lubricated sex toy. Fueled by a combination of intense demand, sleepless nights and brutal competition, the four men at the center of LA's airbrush art market -Dave Willardson, Charles E White III, Peter Palombi, and Peter Lloyd - embarked on careers that produced work for Playboy, Levi's, the Rolling Stones, American Graffiti and Tron. Overspray tells the unvarnished story of these four artists, through images of their best-known work, and frank, in-depth interviews. Viewed today, their surreal, funny and hyperslick imagery; seems all the more fantastic - which combined technical precision; and wild flights of imagination."

10 facts everyone should know about Islam and the Middle East

This is a short clarification that explains a lot of who's who and what's what in the M.E.

via marshallk

Wade's Vagabond Journey

Wade is the best sort of wanderer: the kind who publish their photos, stories, and insights. He's got a blog where his 9 years of world travel (ongoing) are documented. He's going to Eastern Europe and the Middle East next, so give him a shout if you're over there. He writes good stuff about graffiti now and then too. Here's an interesting look at graffiti in Portugal with Odeith, Eskema, and Mr Dheo. And he tries to publish about 50 photos per day.

WTF is a Legend Anyways?

Estria says:

The word 'legend' has become blasé in today's world of Hip Hop. It seems if you painted for a couple-few years, you're a legend. If you were in graffiti for a minute, back in the day, and now you start getting back into the culture, you can consider yourself a king and an OG, a dope authority on the game, if only because you knew so-and-so, or you were there when so-and-so painted such-and-such piece. In fact I think you can now claim the crown without ever having earned the crown.

Read the rest at Estria's blog ...

The Wholesale Sedation of America's Youth

Common population estimates include at least eight million children, ages two to eighteen, receiving prescriptions for ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism, simple depression, schizophrenia, and the dozens of other disorders now included in psychiatric classification manuals. Yet sixty years ago, it was virtually impossible for a child to be considered mentally ill.

[...]

In 1980, hyperactivity, which had been imprudently named “minimal brain dysfunction” in the 1960s, was renamed Attention Deficit Disorder in order to be more politic, but there was an unintended consequence of the move. Parents and teachers, familiar with the name but not always with the symptoms, frequently misidentified children who were shy, slow, or sad (introverted rather than inattentive) as suffering from ADD. Rather than correct the mistake, though, some enterprising physicians responded by prescribing the same drug for the opposite symptoms. This was justified on the grounds that stimulants, which were being offered because they slowed down hyperactive children, might very well have the predicted effect of speeding up under-active kids. In this way, a whole new population of children became eligible for medication. Later, the authors of DSM-III memorialized this practice by renaming ADD again, this time as ADHD, and redefining ADD as inattention. Psychiatry had reached a new level: they were now willing to invent an illness to justify a treatment. It would not be the last time this was done.

[...]

Once a medical illness has been identified, all unwanted behavior becomes fruit of the same tree. Even the children themselves are often at first relieved that their asocial or antisocial impulses reflect an underlying disease and not some flaw in their characters or personalities.

Election Dirty Tricks: Scaring Student Voters

Fooling people into not voting through intimidation and trickery. Oh joy. You have been warned.

DFW RIP

David Foster Wallace, college professor and author of the mindblowing book, Infinite Jest and many others, has apparently killed himself this weekend. Every newsthing is already covering the story of his life, but I have to say a few words because his work and his passing mean a lot to me, and to all of his readers.

His honesty was something I really appreciated ... and every word in that phrase is an extreme understatement. His candid point of view was a blue-white cutting torch with an escape plan. People compare him to Pynchon often, but in my heart he was closer to Vonnegut and Brautigan.

His work is so much fun to read because he invested all of himself in it, he expressed himself in an original way, and he was as hilarious as he was brilliant and insightful. For those lucky people who have not read him yet, please take the time to sample any page in Infinite Jest. I think you'll be very glad that it's a big book.

There's a little taste of him at the link above, a university commencement speech he made. I hope it inspires you too. I sure wish he had stayed a lot longer and said a lot more.

Physical Reality

Congratulations to all the particle physicists in the world! Some have been waiting 30 years to do their experiments on CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which was switched on for the first time September 10. The real party though, is for the many engineers who designed and built this incredibly large and complex machine in France and Switzerland over the last 10 years. It's the biggest, most ambitious and complex engineering project ever undertaken by humans.

"The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The LHC is already operational and is presently in the process of being prepared for collisions. The first beams were circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October."

The first video, above, explains why this machine is interesting, but you have to watch the whole 15 minutes to get the story. The second video is just silly, but it has footage from the inside of the LHC and it's bound to make you feel great about your own MC skills.

Physicists aim to explain how the universe works, and in the process, they ask some very interesting questions. A good book on the topic is A brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which lays it out in words and pictures for everyone to understand.

Wikipedia vs Gilligan's Island: A sea change in human activity

... television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way ... that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is ....

We live in a disruptive time. As humans turn away from TV and begin to participate in making media, community, tools and meaning, we have a surplus of brainpower and time to apply to making a better world together. Viva la difference!

Satanic Plumber Archive

400+ news articles from over two decades on underground New York City subjects..... City Hall Station, graffiti writers busted, Hickey + Ski interview, the Ket saga, the High Line story, WTC diagrams, subway blacksmith, TATs profile, Freedom Tunnel, Caine RIP....... it's all there and more.

via SaneSmith

Street Art and Aesthetics: The Renaissance of Cute

Nick Mount has just published a great article in Walrus, a Canadian magazine. It discusses the relationship between fine art, lowbrow, graffiti, street art, merchandise and collectibles, among other things. Nick does a good job explaining what's going on by taking the long view.

Slick, Extended Conversation

in URB: Culture, by Michael Vazquez

Estria interview

There's a great interview with Estria (San Francisco) in Nichi Bei Times.

See his paintings at estria.net and screenprinting at SamuraiGraphix.

New Web development course - Free

The best thing about this is that it's put out by Opera so it's committed to the standards. If your site is built on standards, it just works for everyone. It's been a long time since some good courseware appeared, and this is new, so check it out.

Catalog from the Street Art show at Tate Modern

For sale, the book.

Book publishing: the lowdown, by Mark Hurst

If you ever think about writing a book, know this first.

Interview with EAST

Games: online, free, and likely even fun - a list

There are tons of free, online games listed, many of which would also be good for kids, even educational. Plenty of shootemups of course and games for improving big-keyboard skills with those digital letters. Strategy, puzzles, old favorites ... I'm not sure about the "strangely compelling cat-tossing game" though. Gotta be something wrong with that.

(Might want to check out the blog there too if you're designing things for a living or running a business. )

A time to look back at how far we've come

"Racism and sexism have not taken their leave. But
the fact that Barack Obama is the presumptive
nominee of the Democratic Party, and that the two
finalists for that prize were a black man and a
white woman, are historical events of the highest
importance. We should not allow ourselves to
overlook the wonder of this moment."

[...]

"This election year has been a testament to the
many long decades of work and sacrifice by men
and women - some famous, most not; some still
alive, many gone - to build a more equitable and
just American society.

"When the night riders were fitted for their
robes, when Wallace stood in the schoolhouse
door, when lowlifes mocked and humiliated those
who were fighting for women’s rights, they were
trying to forestall the realization of this type
of moment in history.

"We’ll see whether Senator Obama gets elected
president. But whether he does or not, this is a
moment of which Americans can be proud, a moment
the society can build upon.

"So a victory lap is in order. Not for Senator
Obama (he still has a way to go), but for all
those in every station in life who ever refused
to submit quietly to hatred and oppression. They
led us to a better place."


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

There's more. Go read it for yourself.

Laser-etched decks

Refill magazine, which focuses on our kind of artists, has curated some laser-etched skate decks. The one by Aaron Horkey (Abuse) is spectacular.

via BoingBoing

Illegal Only magazine from Poland

Another great graffiti magazine has recently come out of Poland, Illegal Only. It is free, downloadable, Mac/Windows - Flash. This format is really cool, because the pages turn quickly and it has some music and video also.

But the best thing is the photography.

Issue 3 features Odessa, Ukraine, and it's something you've got to see. Here is a taste:



Of course they want your artful bombing photos too.

Blek le Rat - new book

Blek le Rat - Getting Through the Walls, published by Thames & Hudson.



Blek le Rat is one of the most influential figures in the world of street art, who is said to have inspired Banksy.

Also, photos of his installation from May 7 at The Conran Shop, Fulham Road, London, by Paul Jenkins.

These look to be pasted up stenciled material of some kind.





Thanks to Mark and Amy.

Copyright for artists, in a nutshell

I get a lot of questions about copyright. This blog article at emptyeasel.com explains the basics and links to the US gov site for copyright details and forms.

Copyrights are for individual expressions. Trademarks are for goods and corporate identity. Some copyright law is international and some is for your own country only. This info pertains to the US but might also apply somewhat to you if you live in another country.

Tip: If you are printing your name on products, you need a trademark also to protect against other people using your name or making counterfeits, but it's $$$$$ to do it, and you might need one trademark per country of interest. If you need a trademark, you probably need a trademark attorney, if only because they can do the big database searches for you.

Parallel Strokes - New book by Ian Lynam

"Parallel Strokes is a collection of interviews with twenty-plus contemporary typeface designers, graffiti writers, and lettering artists around the world. The book is introduced with a comprehensive essay charting the history of graffiti, its relation to type design, and how the two practices relate in the wider context of lettering.

Interviews within include conversations with pan-European type design collective Underware, Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi, American graffiti writer and fine artist Barry McGee/Twist, German graffiti writers Daim and Seak, American lettering artist, graphic designer and design educator Ed Fella, among others. Parallel Strokes is an enquiry into the history, context, and development of lettering today, both culturally approved and illicit.

Softcover, 244 pages, printed in glorious Canada First 100 orders ship with a limited edition 17 in. x 20 in. two-color Parallel Strokes poster
us $25 + Free shipping worldwide.

[Check the link for sample pages and a full list of interviewees.]

A rare dose of truth about the terrorized USA

It's rare to find anything true in the current sea of propaganda, advertisement, disinformation, and Britney. But here is something both true and provocative. Years from now, when people reflect back to this time of eroding civil rights and growing xenophobia in America, they will say what Zbigniew Brzezinski said in this article. As he says, somehow we need to elect a president who will turn things around before they get completely out of hand.

Fuzz One needs our help: Buy his book now

Sadly, Fuzz One's mother just passed away and he is trying to raise funds to cover her funeral costs. So if you were thinking about buying one of his new books, this is the best of all possible times to do that. Here's the info:

Fuzz One
The Last of the Old School
by Vincent Fedorchak

This one you have to buy directly from Fuzz because it's not available anywhere else.
Info: myspace.com/fuzzone
[email protected]

Fuzz says:
Book is 8 1/2 by 11 inches. Heavy and almost 400 pages. All raw text of hardcore NY history.

US customers: No PayPal at all. Only checks allowed from a U.S. bank. Check or money order only. For one book only and extra artwork, the total to send is $40.00. All shipments get sent with Priority Mail and include new artwork I am doing. If you want more than one book, e-mail me for prices.

Any other country: No personal checks. Only International Money Order or U.S. dollars in cash. No Euros or other currency for now. This gets you one book and Priority Mail shipping (airmail). You can send it certified mail so you know I got it, but that is an extra expense for you. It's US$ 50.00 for one book to get sent to England. I have had a few customers from there already. It should be close to that for other European countries but I ask that you e-mail me first from where you are in order to determine if it will cost more. Send inquiries to [email protected]

I will sign each book and in most cases will add my own graffiti artwork by doing something for you and include it with the book. No other authors do that.

More than one book: If you want more than one book, send me a note to tell me how many you want and where you are. New shipping prices will be given to you.

Not doing business with any bookstores or distributors. Write your name and address neatly so I can read it when sending your payment.

Send any payments here:

Vincent Fedorchak
PO Box 111
Port Jervis NY 12771
USA

Cool Tools

The brilliant Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site has some great things on it. Recently I saw

Book on HDR photography
Motion Mountain Physics / Art book - free PDF download

He also has some interesting realtek on his Street Use site. Check out the painted trucks from Pakistan.

How to recognize and counter a bad argument

Learning to identify faulty reasoning will help you over and over in life as media and authority and politicians come at you with bogus arguments. This material was the most valuable stuff I learned in college. It looks boring on the surface but it's actually fascinating because it helps sort out the truth from the BS.

Transit Maps from Around the World

Book available at Amazon

Bombing Modernism: Graffiti and its relationship to the (built) environment

Google Sketchup (free 3D drawing program) has a get-started book now

New book, some how-to videos online too.

Iraq situation report, by 7 US soldiers

This is the most believable and coherent account I've read so far of the situation on the ground in Iraq. Comments are interesting too.

Two of this NYTimes op-ed piece's authors died September 10. Sgt. Omar Mora and co-author Sgt. Yance T. Gray died along with 5 other soldiers and 2 detainees in a vehicle accident, but it would be just as fair to say they died of executive privilege.

GWB gave a feel-good speech tonight about how everything is going so well in Iraq. He should just declare victory and bring the troops home then. And there's more heroin coming out of Afghanistan than ever, so either that was the objective of that war or else it's failed to produce positive results as well. I sure hope we can get him out of office before he starts another war with Iran or Eritria.

The DC protest is coming up on the 15th. I'm sure Alternet will cover that event and so will the streams of images at YouTube and Flickr.

Kaws laptop/book sleeve with Arkitip #41

Gear alert!

Arkitip is a great short-run art mag made by people like us for people like us about art and design, and of course there's not much that's more collectible than a Kaws.

Hand packaged and numbered ltd. edition of 2000

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Nature

Fascinating article from Psychology Today on how reproductive strategies and mating habits cause more boys, more blonds, more suicide bombers, younger criminals and geniuses, and more red sports car buyers.

The good news is that most of these strategies are obsolete in the modern world, and once you understand what's going on, you might be more in control of your life choices.

Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual 7th ed. - Columbia University

Hope you never need this, but it looks like a handy reference.

Bluetooth Shoes

Forget LEDs, here come the shoes that authenticate you.

From Threat Level, which often warns about real threats that are worth fighting against. Bluetooth shoes may not be one of the worrisome things -- that is until they start broadcasting your identity or exhibiting other promiscuous or spoofable behavior.

On a similar note, some video cameras are being hooked up to software that attempts to identify people by their gait (how they walk). This type of mass surveillance may turn out to be more evil in the long run than shoes that let you into your workplace without a keycard.

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

A member of my artificial extended family and the author of the world-view altering books:

Cat's Cradle
Sirens of Titan
Breakfast of Champions
Slaughterhouse-Five

has left us. His point of view will always remain, though, to remind us what kind of species we might have been, had we put a bit more thought into it.

The NY Times said: "His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, "A Man Without a Country." It, too, was a best seller.

In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called "Requiem," which has these closing lines:"

" 'When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

People did not like it here. ' "



... and so it goes.

Heroes, Guards, and Prisoners

Ordinary people become great, evil, and passive, depending on how they react to what's going on around them. This article explains how easy it is to fall into the prison mindset and how anyone can be a hero. This essential info will help you throughout life, so don't skip it.

Bystander's Dilemma - The Banality of Heroism, by Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo, Berkeley.edu

Poetic Terrorism

Hakim Bey, from TAZ

How to be more creative

This cartoonist gives excellent advice to artists. His cartoons are great too.

Understanding Delusion

In these strange days when misguided people think they need to burn buildings for god (and perhaps against god), it's important to look at what we believe and consider the big questions. Like Buford said, "it's been a long long time since wars were fought in the name of the Devil."

Noam Chomsky: There is No War on Terror

"Well, the first thing that should be done in Iraq is for us to be serious about what's going on. There is almost no serious discussion, I'm sorry to say, across the spectrum, of the question of withdrawal. The reason for that is that we are under a rigid doctrine in the West, a religious fanaticism, that says we must believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq even if its main product was lettuce and pickles, and the oil resources of the world were in Central Africa. Anyone who doesn't believe that is condemned as a conspiracy theorist, a Marxist, a madman, or something. Well, you know, if you have three gray cells functioning, you know that that's perfect nonsense. The U.S. invaded Iraq because it has enormous oil resources, mostly untapped, and it's right in the heart of the world's energy system. Which means that if the U.S. manages to control Iraq, it extends enormously its strategic power, what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls its critical leverage over Europe and Asia. Yeah, that's a major reason for controlling the oil resources -- it gives you strategic power. Even if you're on renewable energy you want to do that. So that's the reason for invading Iraq, the fundamental reason.

"Now let's talk about withdrawal. Take any day's newspapers or journals and so on. They start by saying the United States aims to bring about a sovereign democratic independent Iraq. I mean, is that even a remote possibility? Just consider what the policies would be likely to be of an independent sovereign Iraq. If it's more or less democratic, it'll have a Shiite majority. They will naturally want to improve their linkages with Iran, Shiite Iran. Most of the clerics come from Iran. The Badr Brigade, which basically runs the South, is trained in Iran. They have close and sensible economic relationships which are going to increase. So you get an Iraqi/Iran loose alliance. Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there's a Shiite population which has been bitterly oppressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny. And any moves toward independence in Iraq are surely going to stimulate them, it's already happening. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabian oil is. Okay, so you can just imagine the ultimate nightmare in Washington: a loose Shiite alliance controlling most of the world's oil, independent of Washington and probably turning toward the East, where China and others are eager to make relationships with them, and are already doing it. Is that even conceivable? The U.S. would go to nuclear war before allowing that, as things now stand.

"Now, any discussion of withdrawal from Iraq has to at least enter the real world, meaning, at least consider these issues. Just take a look at the commentary in the United States, across the spectrum. How much discussion do you see of these issues? Well, you know, approximately zero, which means that the discussion is just on Mars."

.... and other stuff worth reading as always. Noam brings it home. Check it out. Search out some of his online audio also. It's great.

Edge World Question 2006: What is Your Dangerous Idea?

There is some very interesting stuff in here. Last year's Edge answers were worth reading also. Pace yourself. I like a page per day, but one idea per day would probably be better.