No Title Necessary...

Time is Tight...

Twelve hours till take-off...let the good times roll...

Mug Shot...

Yeah, shameless self-promotion. But hey, the image came out great, despite my neophyte status with Illustrator (of course, it helps to start with pen and ink). Gotta hand it to Cafepress.com for making a one-off possible at a relatively affordable price. Image transfer is spot-on, mug is solid and capacious (15 ounces!), and the artwork is one of a kind, for what it's worth. And yes, that's coffee in the mug in the pic, though it seems to hold beer quite nicely, too.

Speaking of which, also available here is a pretty husky, 22 ounce beer stein sporting gold trim, for those of you who prefer downers to uppers. If you rode it, own it, at cost. Remember, when my oeuvre is hanging in the National Gallery of Art overlaying the Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein pieces (hell, this mug would be the perfect accessory to Duchamp's Fountain, n'est ce pas?), you won't be able to afford me, and I sure as hell ain't giving you a price break then, even if you're cute and charming. It'd be beneath me, and I ain't stoopin'. You've been warned.

Whaam!—indeed.

(Just got back from my first team meeting at The Bicycle Escape in Frederick—more about which soon.)

"Art is a form. A form is something that does not exactly have a history, but a destiny. Art had a destiny. Today, art has fallen into value, and unfortunately at a time when values have suffered. Values: aesthetic value, commercial value...values can be negotiated, bought and sold, exchanged. Forms, as forms, cannot be exchanged for something else, they can only be exchanged among themselves, and the aesthetic illusion comes at that price. For example, in abstraction, when the object is deconstructed, when the world and reality are deconstructed, there is still a way to exchange the object in itself symbolically. But abstraction later became merely a pseudo-analytical procedure for decomposing reality, not deconstructing it. Something has fallen apart, perhaps through the sole effect of repetition."
—Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art

Toasting Tristan...

Raise a frosty glass...today is the birthday of Romanian poet and founding father of Dada, Tristan Tzara. Or is it the 16th?...no matter, consensus is overrated. And anyway, two weeks is long enough to go between beers.

Or so I've heard.

"We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else. But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments."
— Lecture on Dada, 1922

Selling, But Not Selling Out...

Okay, shameless self-promotion without the profit. Art for art's sake. Whatever.

Tee shirts featuring the 2007 Punk Bike Enduro image (Iggy Pop w/ Biker Babe) are now available at my "store" on CafePress. There are two styles of shirts for chix and one for dix. All are white. All are made in the USA. What this last bit really means is that to make this tee shirt, no child of asian descent was interrupted while gnawing off a limb to escape the manacle binding him/her—in accordance with the unassailable rules of globalization and its noble race to the bottom—to an aging Singer. That's meaningful.

Oh yeah, the reason the word store appears above in " " (besides the obvious): I make nothing from the sale of these shirts. The prices reflect the same amount—and not one kopek more—that Cafepress would charge me if I were to buy one myself, which I just did, size L (kiss me, I'm a non-fucking-profit). That's meaningful too, at least to me.

Full disclosure: If you're not familiar with CafePress, it costs me nothing to "sell" these shirts, either. And anyway, given the small audience for which this item may have an appeal, any profit from sales likely wouldn't even cover my tab for one night at the local pub. So, there you have it.

Also, I have not yet seen the final product in the flesh, so to speak. However, if you zoom the image at CafePress, it looks like all the details (e.g., skull-filled background) will show up nicely on the shirts. At the risk of beating this all to death, I'll post a pic when mine arrives.

Personally Famous...

Ah, fame at last. Never imagined it could feel so edifying.

Wait, that's not the word; so, uh...so... pedestrian. Yeah, that's it.

Seems one chap who rode in the recent Single Speed Punk Bike Enduro appreciated the years of sweat equity (and strict asceticism normally reserved for trappist monks) that it took to raise my drawing talents to their material apogee, as represented in my latest artistic reification seen at right (with a dash of pink) and here.

So he approached me to ask for the rights, which I shamelessly granted. The result is shown in the pic above, artfully cropped to preserve his anonymity. Immortalized through the magic of the old school iron-on transfer—a DIY one-off job that seems to have turned out quite well—the image now adorns a canvas à trois dimensions in this world, having narrowly escaped the simulated, absolute zero confines of cyberspace. Nice work!

Did I say immortalized? I meant briefly rescued from shameful obscurity (damn 13¢ words!). The bane of iron-ons, of course, is their tendency to eventually peel away from the fabric like an old scab—hence their near annihilation beneath the bootheel of more technologically advanced processes such as dye sublimation and screenprinting.

But the iron-on's strength lies in its immediacy (as Hakim Bey uses the word), in the fact that it can be created at home with only a modest investment of time and equipment—the same intangible quality that makes all DIY projects ennobling. And its ephemeral nature offers another advantage, at least in this case: if it does self-destruct, it will probably happen before the tell-tale year included in the design renders it passé. Heaven—and all Hell's minions—forbid!

(The iron-on is sort of the fixed gear of the fashion world...long live the iron-on!)

Again, nice job, my friend.

Speaking of the Enduro, here's the GPS data for the ride, flagrantly stolen from Big John of Empathy Test fame. (Hmm, I recall a couple of miles that didn't seem to make the graph—then again, the lines I usually pick can't exactly be called straight.)

The Chairman of the Bored...

...and a rather nubile riding partner.

Yeah, it's on, baby, after being postponed for bad weather a couple weeks back. And though I no longer have the cold that left me with cramped lungs that wanted nothing more than to deflate and roll up like a pair of flaccid hyrdration bladders, I still haven't managed to get much dirt under my treads this year. Gonna be a tough ride...

Coming up next: A springtime Bliss?

Myths and Multiforms...

"To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explained only by those willing to take risks. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way — not his way. We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth… "

— Mark Rothko (w/ Adolph Gottlieb), Abstract Expressionist Manifesto

Some Rothko works are currently on exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Hop on the bike and culture yourself. Take someone you love along with you.

(Reminds me, I need to get to work designing the next Bootlegger's Bliss logo; got a nice concept in the hopper...)