11-21-2008
Silly Me, Make That Two Reviews...
Posted by Matt
And here's another review that was just posted on Shawn Hoke's great mini-comic site Size Matters. Shawn's been writing about comics for a while now. In addition to his blog, you should check out some of his articles about comics on sites such as Comic World News and Reader's Voice.
Here's what he had to say about Todd's:
More zine than mini, Todd's Favorite Adult Actors and Their Favorite Flowers is a series of eight baseball card-like cards sheathed in plastic and attached to the spine of the book like regular pages.
I'll let "Todd" describe his work: "These are my favorite adult actors and their favorite flowers. I investigated the subject extensively in personal conversations I had with these men on dates and during romantic interludes... These descriptions are factual and highly intimate; the reader is warned."
Todd selects eight adult film stars. On the front of each card, artist Zach Huelsing draws a bare-chested star from the pecs up. Escaping from each man's mouth is a single word balloon with the name of their favorite flower written in lower case letters. In the background, Zach provides delicate drawings of the star's chosen flower.
On the back of each card, writer Matt Kessler records the vital statistics of the men, including DOB, height, weight, hometown, and top or bottom status. Underneath the stats, Matt relates, in flowery prose, Todd's encounters with his film fixations. From Todd's encounter with Tom Chase, after Tom pricks his finger on the thorns of a bougainvillea:
"I took the slit finger to my lips and licked each bead of blood with my tongue, lapping at his finger like an unshorn Alpaca. Each drop was nutty and thick, and tasted like wood-aged port."
From Todd's encounter with Roman Ragazzi and the sabra cactus flower:
"I was dancing in a chic Bhangra club hidden in the deep alluvial plains of Punjab... I was dressed in a beautiful Phulkari shawl. It was red and tailored to accentuate the finer parts of my physique."
Todd's cards are a delight. His stories are exotic and intoxicating, and Zach's colorful inked lines help set the mood for Todd's erotic liaisons. The eight protected cards are safely wrapped in a thick cover with the back cover folding over the cards and securing with a hidden Velcro disc. And since Todd's longing is universal and beautifully captured by Matt's prose, Todd's Favorite Adult Actors and Their Favorite Flowers is the type of art object that you'll want to share with all your friends.
Check out Quimby's or the Eye Rocket Books website beginning December 12th. Todd's Favorite Adult Actors and Their Favorite Flowers is a limited edition of 500 and available for $10.
11-21-2008
Todd's Favorite Adult Actors and Their Favorite Flowers Review
Posted by Matt
Our new zine Todd's Favorite Adult Actors and Their Favorite Flowers was reviewed yesterday on the wonderful blog Book By Its Cover. If you're unfamiliar with this blog, you should check it out. Julia reviews zines, comics and art books and does a really nice job with it. She's also part of a design firm Also and they have a really fun website to play around on.
Here's what Julia had to say about Todd's:
This is a little portfolio of cards of adult film actors and their favorite flower. Ha! Each card is in one of the plastic pages like how the baseball cards your mom threw away were kept. The front of the card has a drawing of the actors head surrounded by his flower. A word bubble from his mouth tells you the flower name. The back of the card has the actors stats and a story from "Todd"- written in romance novel speak -of how the actor picked his favorite flower. This is a really fun zine that will make you giggle and probably blush. I just wish the drawings showed more of these handsome men. This book is from Eye Rocket Press and will be available at a variety of comic shops soon.
Available Friday, December 12th!
PS - Release Party at No Coast in Pilsen Thursday, Dec 11th at 7 pm. More details about that one soon!
11-20-2008
Spaghetti Cat
Posted by Matt
Apparently this is Fox's new way of bleeping out the F-word or the S-word. I like it.
11-18-2008
Get Ready To Feel Bummed Out
Posted by Matt
Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch sold this weekend. From what I've read, the site is now in total disrepair. Here are some before and after images I've posted for comparison. Get ready to feel bummed out.
Yesterday:
Today:
11-16-2008
Celebrities Being Interviewed By Joan Rivers
Posted by Matt
Here are some pictures of various celebrities being interviewed by Joan Rivers.
Pee Wee Herman
Bette Davis
David Lee Roth
Weird Al Yankovic
Grace Jones
Mickey Mantle
Howard Stern
Gwar
11-14-2008
Believe The Hype
Posted by Matt
I just started Roberto Bolano's novel 2666 last night and let me be the first to tell you: Believe the hype! I'm only 50 pages in, but, so far, it's incredible. I fired off a quick e-mail to my friend Bill and made a couple observations and remarks about how I thought this book would unfold. Well, as to be expected, my guesses were dead wrong. So, I won't repeat that mistake here. But I will say-- Buy this book!
11-12-2008
The Simple Things In Life
Posted by Matt
Sometimes, it's really the simple things in life that make me smile. A picnic, a cup of coffee, an e-mail from an old friend, these photos of President George H.W. Bush falling flat on his face as he goes bowling with the common man.
Seriously, does it get any funnier than this?
Here's the full clip. I'm just going to milk this as much as I can.
This photo of Bush and Lee Atwater playing guitar together also makes me smile.
11-11-2008
Wow! Dana Carvey looks so young!
Posted by Matt
Last night, Zach showed me this awesome new photo of Dana Carvey. He looks so young!
Call me crazy, but I suspect Carvey's career is going to come back big time. Just imagine if the wonders of Photoshop had been available to these flash-in-the-pan comedians.
These guys could have been so much funnier if Photoshop had been available to them!
11-11-2008
I stole this from another blog
Posted by Zach
Nothing to see here except a cat playing with a box.
11-10-2008
Video Your Vote
Posted by Matt
It's been pretty difficult to focus this past week. I've turned into a bit of a news junkie. Here in Chicago, many of the local news programs are airing some really great local footage. They're also playing some old interviews that they've conducted with president-elect Obama over the years. It's fascinating to see his growth from a somewhat two-dimensional public figure after the 2004 Democratic National Convention to the captivating three-dimensional president-elect.
Like Zach and so many others, I was very disappointed by the outcome of Prop 8. I believe many of us were left wondering how a day of great hope could be tainted by such an egregious civil rights violation. The specific question is--Who voted for Obama and against gay marriage?
Fortunately, PBS and You Tube teamed up to conduct an exciting documentation of Election Day 2008-- Video Your Vote. Using the help of volunteers, PBS recorded interviews with random voters on election day to record as many voter perspectives as possible. They then charted all these videos on a searchable Google Maps app. So far, 1745 videos have been uploaded.
This is an incredible project. Not only can interested armchair historians like myself conduct research at ease, but also, more importantly, a number of voters were able to document instances of voter intimidation and polling place problems. This is one of the best examples I've seen of the long-promised democratization of media that Internet advocates have been yelling about over the years.
So, I began my research, looking specifically for two things: 1) voters in California who voted for Obama and against prop 8 and 2) traditional Republican voters in Alabama who voted for Obama. Needless to say, I didn't find anything near what I was looking for. But I did find an interesting array of perspectives that I find, well, both encouraging and discouraging to put it kindly. I'll probably be posting more of these throughout the week.
11-08-2008
What's the Opposite of a Cloud Having a Silver Lining?
Posted by Zach
While everybody is out celebrating the Obama victory, I want to take the chance to point out how much further we have to go. I was overtaken with emotions when Obama was declared victor, yet I have steadily become increasingly unhappy in this new political environment. Somebody please tell me how I am to believe all the hype about Americans finally righting our wrongs when all we are really watching is evidence that we shift scapegoats and demonize new groups once the old ones fall out of favor. On November 4th this year, Californians chose to -for the first time in American History- take already established rights AWAY from a minority group. I am speaking of the passing of proposition 8. Proposition 8 clearly makes homosexuals second-class citizens. It is truly disgusting. Who even thought they had the authority to vote on the rights of others? Even more degrading is the fact that these same voters voted overwhelmingly to pass a proposition to increase the mandated size of chicken cages. So, chickens were given more rights, and gay PEOPLE had some of theirs taken away. I'm finding it next-to-impossible to celebrate this election.
11-06-2008
Alaska?
Posted by Matt
Like me, many of you might be wondering how recently convicted felon Ted Stevens could possibly have been re-elected senator in Alaska. Well, Nate Silver once again shows why he's this year's rising star with some great follow-up analysis of the numbers. It looks like there's some very fishy business going on up there. To quote Silver:
Although Ted Stevens holds a small lead in Alaska and is the favorite to retain his seat, the outcome is not as inevitable as it might appear to be. Stevens currently holds a lead of 3,353 votes, or about 1.5 percent of the votes tallied so far. But, there are quite a large number of ballots yet to count. According to Roll Call, these include "at least 40,000 absentee ballot, 9,000 early voting ballots, and an undetermined number of questionable ballots.
Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.
But even if Begich were to make up ground and win a narrow victory, this would seem to represent a catastrophic failure of polling, as three polls conducted following the guilty verdict in Stevens' corruption trial had Begich leading by margins of 7, 8 and 22 points, respectively.
The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest -- voters told pollsters that they weren't about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem.
The problem with this theory is that the polling failures in Alaska weren't unique to Stevens. They also applied to the presidential race, as well as Alaska's at-large House seat. In each case, the Republican outperformed his pre-election polling by margins ranging from 12 to 14 points.
11-04-2008
I Know Why The Caged Bird Pushes Reload 10,000,000 Times An Hour On The New York Times Election Results Dashboard Page
Posted by Matt
Like Zach, I can't sit still. I've been hitting reload on this puppy all day long. Tonight, I'm going downtown to either a) celebrate and get absolutely completely entirely disgustingly wasted and hug random strangers and dance on tabletops like I've been waiting to do for eight years or b) cry and pick out my eyes and make sacrificial offerings of random old white men in blazers.
Come join me!
11-04-2008
Final Projections
Posted by Zach
Ok, if you haven't yet been to fivethirtyeight.com, then you probably are a much calmer individual than me. Somehow, as Obama's numbers have continued to increase, so has my anxiety. Like today, for example, Nate Silver (538's head polling guru) is saying that McCain has a 1.1% chance of winning the election. More on this tomorrow, presumably.
11-03-2008
The Girl Can't Help It!
Posted by Matt
There goes Jill, one of my very best friends in the world, making me look like a chump again. She just sent me these photos of her Halloween costume. It's awesome!!! I was Wilfred Brimley. She was a box of Tunnocks Tea Cakes. That's so much cooler. I'm definitely going to put more time into my costume next year. Maybe I'll fly over to London and try to learn some of her skills!
