The Best of Ariel Pink's Sketchbook (NSFW)

Scooped from an angelfire website with 18 drawings, I've selected for you, the BEST 10 of AP's sketchbook.

For context, Ariel Pink is a lo-fi, avant garde musician from Los Angeles, California. He's noted as being "weird" or "outsider" and these drawings neither confirm nor deny this. Personally, what I like about these sketchbook drawings is they maintain craft. He didn't play down his ability to draw which is pretty great in the context of a sketchbook. The images where he does use simple lines and shading are hilarious. His drawing ability is so consistent and well-rendered, it's borderline obsessive. I always wished, when I kept a sketchbook, that my drawings would meet both criteria seen here: 1. well drawn 2. interesting but after seeing these, I don't think I can ever doodle again.

10.
This looks like some sort of contraption straight out of a Tim Burton movie but with hidden dicks?

9.

A faceless "psychedelic businessman" is similarly Tim Burton-esque but with less dicks and shards of clothing holding on to the contraption.

8.

I think a couple of these are for mixtapes? This is the first of the two. Ignore the great list of music on the side and just the gross, old man, face saying he's "fucked up and horny" clearly commuicates a possible underlying theme for the tape. Plus, I always want to hear "what was said at the dinner party" and music from MEGAMAN.

7.

More traditionally artsy? It's a haunting show of draping and stretching over stuff that I can't quite make out besides the upside-down bird at the bottom.

6.

Maybe it's a scrapped album cover or single cover, as we can see his name in the upper left corner...but continuing on the theme from number 7; it's as if items are lost in some weird mass of drape-y material.

5.

Old fart, Booty time is amazing.

4.

Whatever this is, I'd like to own it. It seems like another tape cover with his music on it, as I am noticing some familiar song titles. Notice that Peter Schilling, David Bowie, Santana and Isaac Hayes all played a part in the making of this :-)

3.

Hellloooo, Benjamin Marra!!! Testosterone eaters, johnny pump? I need an AP + Benjamin Marra comic immediately.

2.

A child hiding inside various human forms.

!!!!!#1.!!!!!! Not sure I've seen a better sketchbook impression of boredom. Are those neurons coming out of the bottom? So good.

"Her Body's Not Real/It Looks Like Crumb Drew Her"

UGK featuring Akon - "Hard As Hell"


So, most of you nerds probably only listen to like, Linkin Park and read Secret Invasion or like fall asleep to The Decemberists with a copy of Optic Nerve on your lap, but if you don't know, the great UGK's final album, UGK 4 LIFE comes out today and it's really good and on "Hard as Hell"--which on the real, is the only kinda boner-kill on the album, the verses are still great though--does feature Bun B describing as woman as "look[ing] like Crumb drew her". So you know, comics stuff too!

-UGK featuring E-40, B-Legit, and 8ball & MJG "Used to Be"

If you want my kinder, less asshole-ish reasons for why UGK's great, click here.

Irmin & The Technicolor Silver Surfer Track Jacket

Was just talking to Sammy about how Black Sabbath are just this slightly more heavy hippie band but too many of their fans don't like to admit it, so I was going through You Tube showing comparable heavy/scary hippie groups like CAN and found this late-career performance which is pretty great for a number of reasons, among them, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt's awesome technicolor track jacket with a big Silver Surfer on the back.

Percy Carey Making Some Comic About APES!

Swiped from the Oh Word feed--Percy Carey, writer of the graphic novel Sentences and rapper under the name MF Grimm, recently wrote a quick blog about the long-standing feud/fallout/whatever between himself and MF Doom and how you know, it just isn't a feud anymore and everyone needs to move on. And that's cool and a big deal because Grimm's gone pretty hard at Doom for being a dick (which he is) and a lame sell-out who's reduced his talents to rapping alongside of Meatwad from Aqua Teen (which is also true) but the bigger, less tabloid-y thing is that Carey hints at his next graphic novel:

"I'm on a path to become a better person, it's the only way the creator will allow me to enjoy the benefits of life. I'm about to apply for college, and attempt to get a degree in marketing, I'm also donating my time to the local zoo, because of my fascination of studying orangutans; my goal is to create a story about them and other great apes and turn it into a graphic novel"

Sounds great!

For those that don't know, Grimm also does a weekly comics column for the very bro-friendly Complex magazine website....

Here's a classic Doom/Grimm collaboration from Doom's Operation Doomsday:

Quasimoto Action Figure from KID ROBOT

Just click "Play" on the video above and don't think too hard. This appropriately drowsy ad for the KID ROBOT's Quasimoto action figure's backed by the music of Madlib, whose alter-ego is the helium-voiced Alf/Ant-eater/itdoesn'treallymatter Id that is Quasimoto, sometimes Lord Quas. And now it's this figure that comes in Yellow and Blue, with awesome art by STONES THROW records' art director Jeff Jank:




Jank's artwork is the perfect analogue to STONES THROW's personal and personable hip-hop. Like a Madlib beat which'll sample some dope Melvin Van Peebles record or some weird-ass Bollywood crooner, Jank's pulls from any and anywhere, with a focused, distinctly professional sense of design that's throwback but then, a mindfully handmade, looks-like-doodling drawing style. His drawings looked scratched-out on paper like he never lifted his pencil from the paper while drawing and although his lines wobble, there's a really crazy sense of consistency to the wobble that trips you up.

Notice the hand-drawn sense you get from the "Q" sign on the cover to Quasimoto's The Unseen or the contrast between computerized shading and gradients on that same cover or on Further Adventures and how somehow, it like works right along with the dotted grit of the building's bricks AND the photographs of people placed, collage-like in some of the windows. It has the same insane but perfect sense of contrast and complement as something like Jack Kirby's collages.

This cover for J. Dilla's masterpiece Donuts is crazy on the perspective, but also feels like some kind of weird, captured-from-life image realist image too. Brandon Graham's work is perhaps the best example of what I'm talking about, where somehow it's bubbly, inherent cartoony-ness is so well-rendered that it feels as real as some hyper-realistic painting of the same thing. Something about those angled, nervous lines that mark the different window panes on the shop that accomplishes more than a straight-edge...

There's also just a charm to Jank's work, as seen in the gold-toofed donut gobbler or that Dragonball Turtle Master-esque dude (wonderfully named by Jank, "Lord Wigflip")...



-Promo for B-Ball Zombie War Compilation featuring Lord Wig Flip!


-"Bullyshit"


-"Don't Blink" (Incredible fan-made Lord Quas animation)

Designer, Graffer, Comics Nerd, CEY ADAMS

The new issue of Wax Poetics features, among other great things, an interview with graphic designer Cey Adams. Adams is best known as an early graffiti writer, in-house designer for DEF JAM records during the 80s, and brains behind plenty of iconic hip-hop album covers (Ready to Die, Fear of a Black Planet) and could've been one of many dudes to make a book that bigs himself up exclusively, but instead he's gone ahead and made a crazy compendium/history of rap inspired design called DEFinition:The Art & Design of Hip-Hop.

Among the many things Adams and interviewer Michael A. Gonzales (himself something of a legend, check him out at Riffs & Revolutions) get into is illustration and hip-hop and the connection to comics. Adams was responsible for hiring the great Bill Sienkiewicz to paint the cover of EPMD's Business as Usual. A bunch of years later, Sienkiewicz would do the cover of RZA's Bobby Digital album as well- a great mix of Sienkiewicz's hyper-real style of illustration meeting up with those explosive 70s blaxploitation movie painted posters.




Adams also discusses the hiring of children's book illustrator Ed Renfro to do the art for the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty, which as far I can tell, never came to fruition beyond this great T-shirt design:


Another fascinating aspect of the article is Adams discussing the cover art of Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet and how the idea, after it was conceptualized by Chuck D, they decided to find "an illustrator that really unders[tood] how the solar system works" and they got B.E Johnson who had worked for NASA! One of the coolest parts of Adams' book is the presentation of Johnson's original painting without any graphics on it, just this Public Enemy logo on the moon and then earth and nebulas and awesome space shit floating around behind it:

Archer Prewitt > Chris Ware

Archer Prewitt's Sof Boy comic is a 90s indie classic--and woefully OOP!--about a cute, marshmallow-y guy getting kicked and tortured in a bunch of ways and always sort of still keeping his spirits up. It's really hilarious and oddly affecting. Prewitt's also in the band The Sea & Cake who released Car Alarm a couple of months ago, and it's easily one of the best albums of the year that isn't an hour of shredding.


This month also marks the release of an action figure of Raymond Scott, which Prewitt did the design work for; for those not aware, Raymond Scott was the guy who composed a lot of the music that ended up in Looney Tunes cartoons and was also this totally crazy electronics music inventor and pioneer. Here's more information about him that I wrote, for those who care.

One of the more interesting aspects of Prewitt's design is how it has the same feeling as his work on Sofboy and other stuff, this kind of determined line that's still scratchy and a little ugly, but is smooth and clean like conventional advertising. He still finds places to make it interesting and so, it isn't cold or harsh. He's one of the few graphic designers around that isn't sort of making advertising art that's about advertising.

There's a lot of time spent on making it aesthetically pleasing but as much time's spent on making it sort of making it look uneven or a little drunk or something: Scott's angular proportions, puffy lettering of varying size, etc. Also, so much "cool" design work falls back on the obviously incredible work of the 50s and early 60s but here it makes total sense as it's Raymond Scott's era. It's when he was making most of his music and it's the only era that was crazily open-minded and corporate-minded enough to see Scott's electronic compositions as making sense of commercial background music. This odd mix of the avant-garde and bottom-line economics.

Prewitt's design work comes especially illuminating when compared to another Chicago-based comics dude/graphic designer, Chris Ware. Ware's work is formally obsessive and yeah, that's the point and all, but it's something that both makes his work immediately identifiable and frankly, not that interesting over time.

Other than the sheer craft, there's not a lot of joy or exuberance in Ware's work and worse, even when he's aping ragtime-era record sleeves, there's this odd level of irony or way of putting it all in quotes. Prewitt's work's steeped in the past too, but he seems less interested in up-ending America's ugly past--the kind of dumb Zinn-thought most of us get over by college--through design and irony, than infecting some joy and a touch of chaos into our lives.

The Scott design also reminds me of The Sea and Cake's video of their cover of David Bowie's "Sound & Vision":


Prewitt's done some action figure design work before as seen below. There's the toy of another electronics innovator Robert Moog (inventor of the moog synthesizer, obviously), a particularly hilarious one of the Kauffman brothers from Adaptation, and some dolls of Prewitt's early band, The Coctails:

Alchemist's Zombie Rap Video For "Lose Your Life"

Animated by Devin Flynn, who does Y'all So Stupid and the credit sequence from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, and the animation parts of this which was posted awhile back. This is way better than any of those. It's maybe the coolest thing I've seen in awhile. Stuffy but fluid animation of faces melting and monsters attacking. Rapper Jadakiss rips his tongue out and wears it as a tie. Particularly affecting is seeing an animated Prodigy of Mobb Deep busting out of jail Mr. Hyde style (P's currently serving three and a half years in jail).

-swiped from Hater Player

What's On Your DMZ House Party List?

DMZ #36 comes out this Wednesday and finishes up the mini-story "The Island" that started last month. Guest artist Kristian Donaldson brings something extra to the story of a bunch of soldiers going party crazy on Staten Island and Brian Wood's writing is really smart as usual.

The most brilliant aspect of "The Island" is the way all these soldiers partying feels--and is--exactly the same as every, a little too crazy beer party you attended in high-school or college: People puking, people not having a good time, people having too good of a time, fun fighting, not so fun fighting, everybody wanting to do it with somebody, etc. etc. It treats the soldiers no different than the rest of us beer-drinking goons, which happens less in representations of war than you'd expect. They aren't idealized and they aren't demonized.

One of the sub-highlights of the issue was Brian Wood's 'Vertigo Voices' column, wherein he admits that his experience with Staten Island, "aside from listening to old Wu-Tang cassettes, is limited to visiting twice" and quickly recounts a house party he attended, and then gives the column over to everyone that works on DMZ to drop a list of "top 5 beer drinking/house party/shout along/get fucked up/DMZ rock-out mix tape songs...". What's so awesome about everybody's list is how it's no bullshit. No one seems like they're trying to be cool or clever or snobby...everyone just picked great party songs that they liked!

Here are our lists, what's on yours?

Brandon:
-"Stay Fly" by Three-Six Mafia
-"I Like It" by Grand Puba
-"Die By the Sword" by Slayer
-"Broken Down But Not Locked Up" by Eyehategod
-"Starz" by Jaylib

Samuel Rules:
-"Work Out Plan" by Kanye West
-"Party Til You Puke" by Andrew W.K.
-"Doom Doom Doom!" by Latterman
-"Dance My Pain Away" by Rod Lee
-"Lose Control" by Missy Elliot

Jesse:
- "Boogie Shoes" by KC and the Sunshine Band
- "Testin' My Gangsta" by Three 6 Mafia
- "Ain't Talkin 'Bout Love" by Van Halen
- " Conversation" by Mannie Fresh
- "You and I" by Rick James

Monique R.:
- "Conceited" by Remy Ma
- "Get It Girl" by 2 Live Crew
- "Ain't Gonna Hurt Nobody" by Kid N' Play
- "Tipsy" by J-Kwon
- "Born Slippy" by Underworld

Karen:
- "I Luv Your Girl" by The Dream
- "We Laugh At Danger (And Break All the Rules)" by Against Me!
- "Nu Autobahn" by Future Islands
- "Five Finger Discount" by Choking Victim
- "El Scorcho" by Weezer

David:
- "Bad Mouth" by Fugazi
- "Car Thief" by Beastie Boys
- "Youth Decay" by Sleater Kinney
- "I Am a Tree" by Guided By Voices
- "Letter To Memphis" by Pixies

Arthur Russell's Animals

For those that don't know, Arthur Russell was a cellist/disco producer/electronic musician that bounced from musical sub-culture to musical sub-culture throughout the late 70s and into the 80s before dying of AIDS in 1992.

In recent years, thanks to Audika records, a ton of Russell's work's been re-released or released for the first time and along with it, some of Russell's album art, which is often these really great line type drawings of animals and dinosaurs and stuff.

From 24 24 Music:




The Flying Hearts' work can be heard on the latest Russell release Love is Overtaking Me:


From First Thought, Best Thought:



From Calling Out of Context:




FLYERS:





Trailer for Wild Combination, documentary on Russell out on DVD November 18th:

Pop-Up Book Circus Art Fun With T-Pain

While hardly comics related, at the record store yesterday, I noticed the really cool art and design on the 12-inch single of T-Pain and Lil Wayne's song "Can't Believe It". The design and overall weirdness of T-Pain's latest album Thr33 Ringz (out in November) has been a topic of discussion in the hip-hop world and tons of places are posting the circus-themed cover art, but no one's talking about who actually did this art. My plan for this post was to you know, figure it out but an all-day search on the internet's revealed nothing. Anybody out there know?


The cohesion of the entire package is great, as each single copies an old-time circus poster, with a Medusa-esque T-Pain at the top and a equally fun caricature of the guest and then, a layer of color over the whole thing that's appropriate to the song (an icey blue for the Chris Brown featuring "Freeze"). The caricatures remind me a lot of BAPE master Nigo's work--especially the art for Pharrell Williams' In My Mind--and maybe he had something to do with this, but there's less robotic, factory-line imagery here and more, spare in some places, expressive in others line here. Notice T-Pain's nose, Lil Wayne's tattoos, or Ludacris' perfect smirk. On the back of the album itself, each guest on Thr33 Ringz gets one of these illustrations and they're all surrounding T-Pain, who's at the center of some carnival game wheel or something.


The album cover itself, plays it a little more safe, with a silhouette of ringmaster T-Pain and circus iconography in the background. Conceptually it's cool because the cover is the introduction to the music--the main attraction--which you'll only get to hear once you buy the CD, but there's an added surprise...the interior album art folds and pops-up and makes a kinda mini-circus itself!

R.I.P Neal Hefti (Batman Theme Guy)

Neal Hefti, mainly known by nerds like you and me as the dude who made the theme song to the classic Adam West "Batman" TV show died recently.

I sort of always took the old "Batman" show for granted since it was my first exposure outside of some 80s Detective Comics and the 1989 movie, and so unlike a lot of people, it's never seemed all that goofy or ironic. Yeah, now it's clear why "Bat Shark Repellent" being handy when he's attacked by a shark is silly, but that's sort of the point, no? People who make fun of the old show for being "corny" kinda missed the point. When I was little, watching it on "The Family Channel" and taping it because only my Grandmother had cable, it was the shit.

I ran around outside with a purple pillowcase around my neck and said I was Robin. One time, this retarded girl that was visiting her Grandmother next door told me that the purple pillowcase was pink and I kept correcting her to her Grandmother because i was too young to know to give retarded people a break.

The "Batman Theme" too, has just sort of been a part of my life forever and so, it's always seemed like the perfect complement to the show but listening to it now, it's also a pretty interesting composition. It's clear listening to it and reading some Hefti obituaries, that the he was a real jazz dude, working with Count Basie and accompanying Sinatra once or twice, because the song uses the heft of all the instruments in a very jazz-like way and also, those aural equivalent of a comic-book punch horn stabs are perfect and are maybe even on some like free-jazz influence type shit? The chugging drums too, are both understated and heavy, leading the way, like some more avant jazz drumming, but then its recorded in this raw, kinda awful way, like a lot of 60s pop. That, along with the girl-group singing makes me think there's some like Phil Spector influence in there? Like the show, the theme's a tangle of crazy, disparate half-baked influences.

Found the full-length composition on You Tube, as well as a track from an LP Hefti did of more "Batman" style songs...

-"Batman Theme" (Full Length)


-"Evil Plot to Blow Up Batman"

Do Miracles in Nikes Like Jesus Did In Sandals...

-MF Grimm "Take Em' to War" off Scars & Memories

Percy Carey, aka MF Grimm's pretty devastating graphic novel Sentences comes out in paperback today. Carey was a kid actor on Sesame Street, a part of early 90s Underground rap, a drug dealer that survived a murder attempt but ended up paralyzed, a friend and then enemy of MF Doom, and other crazy stuff. I'm still really down on the artwork in this book by Ronald Wimberly--some pseudo graf meets The Boondocks bullshit--but Carey's smart about his story and I really like how much of it is just narration and images and like, barely even a typical comic book or anything.