I suppose I should be honest about how this whole “Speed Creating” thing started.  Around November, my girlfriend of roughly 4 years and I broke up.  I’m not trying to turn this into one of the closing scenes of My So Called Life, I just want to be honest about my motivations as opposed to my usual  practice of remaining willfully ignorant of the things that make me do the things I do.

One of the chief concerns I was having as the relationship kind of fell apart was “what makes me happy?”.  A heavy set of circumstances had me feeling pretty terrible about myself and “Who I Am”.  I didn’t really have a good sense of how to make myself happy or how to express myself…I was lost and not only was it a weight on my relationship, it was obviously a huge weight on me.  When I racked my brain to find a way out of the bouts of deep depression I often found myself in, I didn’t have any answers, save for this weird hint that “What Makes Me Happy” is “Creating”.  My whole life I’ve been drawn to making things…doesn’t matter what, just making stuff.  In the moments where my head is down and ideas are flowing, I’m not thinking of anything else and I feel great.

So that is what I set myself up to do.  Chase down my tiny thread of creative DNA, wrestle it to the ground and stare at it to see if it really held what I needed.

Around the time of the breakup I saw what Dominic Wilcox had done, and it immediately clicked with me.  There was no doubt that I was going to follow the same regimented path, to turn my potential happiness into a homework assignment.  I picked January, because the winter out here kind of sucks the soul anyway, and it could double as kind of a New Years Resolution deal.

I’m happy to report that this thing has been extremely eye-opening.  You’ll have to forgive the cheesiness here, but I made a pretty big realization during this thing – that I am on this earth to create.  Apologies for the hyperbole, but as a weapon I’m only pulling it out here because I plan on using it.

Up until this point I struggled to find a box for what I love to do…am I a “writer”?  Am I a “photographer”?  I’m not very good at design, but I love doing it, so could I call myself a “designer”?  I’ve had a Flip Cam duct-taped to my hand for the last 3 years…does that make me a “videographer”?  What the hell AM I?  I always considered myself a writer, but only because I do that more than anything, and it gives me the most crisis-laden stressful high of anything I do.  But I’m not all that great at making a career out of it.

I’m straying.  My point is, I learned (in one of many moments of forehead-slappery) that I am not any of those things.  I’m just a guy who likes to “create”. “Creator”, I suppose, but that is too specific and a little weird.  So I’m more comfortable with “Guy Who Lives To Create”…funny…I just tried to type “Guy Who LIKES To Create” just now, but I slipped on the “k” and put a “v” instead….giving me “lives” instead of “likes”…ha…the K and the V are nowhere near each other on the keyboard.  Even I don’t know what I’m thinking.  Wow.

So, that being said, I LIVE to create I guess.  All of those things I listed above – writing, photography, video, music, design – flick the exact same switch.  The same light goes on and off no matter what triggers it – writing about zombies, making music with Ben, taking light painting photos, shooting in the snowy streets with my Holga, cutting and pasting like a madman in Photoshop, sketching, ironing on letters – all of that provides the same simple impulse that I’ve been chasing my whole life.

I’m not saying I found my life’s purpose.  That would be a little much.  I did find though, that I had been neglecting a massive part of what made Me “Me”, and I’m glad to be reconnected to it.

I also learned more about where my skills are.  I learned that I am pretty good at writing zombie stories, that I am able to edit videos that make me laugh, that I am not a very good musician but I love to make noise and record it, that I can almost execute an idea with a photograph, that I have a basic understanding of design and how to make something look halfway decent, and that when pressed (especially when pressed) I can create at the drop of a hat.

Like I’ve always said, none of the stuff I make has any illusions about being “good”, but that’s not the point.  It is all still an expression.  Good or bad, the switch gets flicked.

With the motivation behind this thing out in the open, I hope I can continue to do this stuff.  I want to just keep doing something every day because it really does make me happy.  Don’t worry though, I wont meticulously blog about it.  I’ll just do it because I love doing it.  I highly recommend it to everyone…whatever your talents are, use them every day, and then do some stuff you are less than talented at.

Day 1 – Optronics 4-1 with Oceans in Space  [VIDEO]

Day 2 – The Lightpainting Mini Booth

Day 3 – Allegedly Hilarious T-Shirt

Day 4 – Disposable Camera Photos

Day 5 – Photoshop Vs. Jandek

Day 6 – Photos From the MiniBooth

Day 7 – Desert Lightpaintings

Day 8 – Noise Tape Layout 1

Day 9 – Noise Tape Layout 2 + Download

Day 10 – Noise Tape Layout 3 (Black Metal?)

Day 11 – Optronics 4-2 With Oceans In Space  [VIDEO]

Day 12 – Fuckin “Art”, Brah

Day 13 – Movies That Bugged Me Out as a Kid – Body Parts

Day 14 – Brian Tumors Download

Day 15 – Zombie Fiction – “Cakewalk” Part 1

Day 16 – Recaptured:  L5D – “Advanced Ants Dance”

Day 17 – Lil B @ Highline Ballroom  [VIDEO]

Day 18 – Mirror Lightpainting

Day 19 – The Battle of the Red Dragon  [VIDEO]

Day 20 – Ke$ha Slowed by 800%

Day 21 – Anthony:  A Life (In Three Parts)  [VIDEO]

Day 22 – The Scum Noise Tape Full Download

Day 23 – Cocktail Napkin Zombie Story

Day 24 – Zombie Fiction – “Cakewalk” Part 2

Day 25 – Zombie Fiction – “Untitled” Part 5

Day 26 – Blizzard/Apocalypse Music

Day 27 – Canvas Drawing

Day 28 – Ghostbusters Firehouse Holga Photos

Day 29 – Allegedly Hilarious Lil B T-Shirt

Day 30 – More Holga Photos

Day 31 – Drew is an Art Dealer Now  [VIDEO]

Like I said, my shit is completely lost over here.  I’ll recap all the madness tomorrow OR WHENEVER THE HELL I WANT because January is over!  Suck it, speed creating!

Shot these a few nights ago to turn into a gift for my brother, who is a firefighter and kills for anything fire-related.  So I went and grabbed some shots of the firehouse from Ghostbusters with my Holga.  I was shooting on some crazy film I bought on a whim.  It had a ridiculously low ISO so I had no idea how they would turn out but man, I really like the results.  There are more on the way from the same roll.

Below are the firehouse shots, as well as a compilation I put together to print out and send to him.

]]> http://namedropacid.com/2011/01/speed-creating-day-27-ghostbusters-firehouse-photos/feed/ 0 http://namedropacid.com/2011/01/speed-creating-day-26-canvas-drawing/ http://namedropacid.com/2011/01/speed-creating-day-26-canvas-drawing/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 04:32:28 +0000 C______ http://namedropacid.com/?p=859

Today was a snow day here in New York.  After last nights noisy, cable-ridden apocalypse, I woke to the amazing (seriously amazing) realization that our offices here were closed and I got to “work from home” (not work at all).

So after high fiving my sleeping roommates in the face, I went to sleep for another three hours.  Spent the rest of the day making awesome food, playing video games, watching netflix, cleaning the apartment, etc. etc.  It was basically Sunday in the middle of the week.

Later on I sat down to watch the premiere of this movie called Life In a Day.  The idea is pretty sweet.  People all over the world film themselves on one day (July 24, 2010) and submit their footage via youtube.  The guy who directed The Last King of Scotland goes through all the footage and turns it into a picture of life on earth in one day.

I went out this summer and shot footage for it, just for fun.  I don’t think I made it in the film, but it was still a cool experience, even cooler to see what kind of stuff did make it in from all over the world, as I watched the premiere on youtube.

It was still youtube though, so as the film stuttered along, I passed the time by drawing on these tiny canvases I found at the store, at the beginning of this project.  Definitely couldn’t be called “art”, but it is a thing, and I created it.  You can check out the photo of it above.

Clearly, technology wasn’t working out for me.  So when I was the most frustrated, I went “analog” and grabbed a pen and some graph paper and started to just draw.  The image I was chasing in my head was similar to the cover of Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma in that it was just a bunch of lines converging and doing strange things.

It came out as a glorified doodle, and I wont say its any good, nor is it particularly moving, but it did accomplish something.  It calmed me down.  Afterward I felt considerably more relaxed and creative.  So I brewed some coffee (in a stock pot because my coffee maker recently became a cockroach tenement) and dropped my “piece” into it to dye it a little, and then to “mount” my “art” I cut out a piece of a pizza box and wrote “LETS GET REALLY HIGH AND LISTEN TO METAL”  on it.

Boom.  Art.  Done.

So if you are ever stressed and need to clear some fury from your brain, grab a pen and paper or better yet, grab anything that you feel semi-confident “creating” with and don’t think, just start working.  Its better for stress relief than drinking or yelling or throwing a 90’s tape recorder at a wall as hard as you can.

This photo came across my e-desk in my office on the third floor of the internet. It came to me via my assistant, Emilio Estevez from Freejack, and it is the best thing I have ever seen.

First of all, lets hope that the little girl is OK.  OK?   She’s fine.  She went on to live a full and happy life because this woman clearly had complete control of the situation and wouldn’t let anything happen to her (probably) niece.

Second of all, lets call this what it is, but then ignore what it is so the hilarity can flow freely.  This is probably photoshopped.  Almost 80 percent sure that it is.  If it is, I don’t give a damn.  Give the photo-shoppist a bucket of my laughing tears and a gold watch as a reward, because he needs to be recognized as a god among men before he dies covered in bedsores at his computer.  This guy is the Van Gogh of the internet.  Lets not let his life end without recognition for such a work of art.

Finally, lets attack this as if it were a real life snapshot of a real life situation.  So many questions.  What was interesting that the photographer was trying to capture?  Lets watch my niece plays with our dog (fucking HELLBEAST) while my lovely wife (who is awesome with both kids and dogs) supervises?  What is the woman holding the dog thinking?  She seems to be nodding off…which makes this so much better.  One person in this picture is bored to the point of nodding off.  The other person is in full-on primal holy fuck a fucking sabretooth tiger is chasing me I’ll never sleep again mode.  That’s fear right there folks.  Look at it in the face.  Right there.

Furthermore, where are they?  Is that chicken wire around the gates of fucking hell?  Because that thing is clearly a one-headed Cerebrus.  AND WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THAT DOG?  Good god its horrifying.  Its like, hey I’m a little girl walking along in my yellow raincoat thinking that there is no way that the things from my nightmares will ever be real, well maybe there is a slight chance but my parents told me it was all good so now I’m just hanging out with my aunt and uncle on their meth ranch and I’m eating a Push Up and fucking WHAM! EVERYTHING I EVER WAS AFRAID OF EVER IS NOW REAL AND ALIVE AND TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME.  I will never trust anyone again.

Congratulations That Picture, you have now unseated this Bill Dance Fishing Bloopers Montage as the best thing I have ever seen.

I don’t mean to set myself up as any kind of eulogist, but I wanted to write about something beautiful that happened recently in the wake of something awful.

A friend died recently, under very strange (and tragic) circumstances.  His name was Chris Thompson (In the Photo Above), but a lot of his friends knew him as “Little Man”.  Upon meeting him, the name made sense.  He was on the short side, built like a truck, hair constantly pulled back…I always picture him in a leather jacket, smoking cigarettes and listening intently whenever you’d speak.  The nickname was never meant as a dig to his size…in fact, only his friends called him that, and no one ever did it with any trace of malice.

He was one of the first people to not be shitty to me on my first day in high school.  He hung out in “The Cubby”, a weird little alcove in a hallway near the library where the metalhead kids would hang out.  Chris and I were never close, but he was always extremely nice to me, and I appreciated that.  The closest we got was one summer we talked for hours on the phone (because without a car, what the hell else were we supposed to do?) about how to beat Tomb Raider (because that game was EVIL)…and he talked me through a few rough patches.

As time went on, our crew in The Cubby grew to include the skater kids, the ravers, the hip hop heads, the hippies, the drunks, the auto body freaks…basically anyone who found themselves on the fringes of the backwards-ass high school culture.  And it was great…we never wanted for someone to talk to or hang out with.

Anyway, we all kind of drifted after high school, apart and all over the world, which I’m coming to learn is basically required for adulthood.  It gets harder and harder to remember where you came from and the distractions pile up until something happens to yank you out of your routine, making you stop and realize not just how far you’ve come, but how great everything was where you started.

In this case, it was the untimely and weird death of our friend Chris.  Now, I don’t want to go ahead and act like we were best friends.  There are people out there who knew him infinitely better than I did, and no doubt felt the sting more than me.  I don’t want to downplay their loss, I just want to point out something that I think we can all appreciate.

After his passing I started seeing people change.  Most of this took place on facebook (making this the ONLY profound thing I’ve ever seen on facebook) where the people who knew Chris kind of gathered to commiserate over their loss.  After the initial shock faded, pictures started popping up.  Everyone who knew Chris started posting these amazing, scanned-in pictures (usually photos with Chris or connected to him somehow) of all of us as 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade kids, decked out in insane clothing, covered in our favorite bands, communal over Slayer, Megadeth, and shit…Marilyn Manson.  Dark clothes, weird jeans, shitty homemade bongs, even shittier weed, skateboards, great music, cigarettes, and more cigarettes…our only concerns being where we could hang out after school and whether or not the “cool guy” who didn’t card for smokes was working at Oasis Market.  Seeing these pictures reminded me, and I hope a few other people of how awesome we all were back then (despite some of the fashion choices), and it made me conscious of the kid I was, wondering what that kid would think of me now.

Which is infinitely valuable.  As things get more complicated and you get older, the best move (which I now realize thanks to all of this madness) is to just start doing/listening/thinking about/talking about whatever it is you loved when you were 15.

So before I ramble more, here are the photos.  I think they are perfect (especially that one of Joe’s wall with MEGADETH written in duct tape).  A lot of them were taken by Joe, some by Shawn, and some by Bill.  If anyone objects to these being up, just let me know and I will remove them.

Thats Chris in the bottom two photos as well.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is great.  I know we would all prefer to have Chris still around, with these photos safely buried somewhere, but given the situation, we’re lucky that at least something special grew from something so awful.

Rest in peace sir.  Play a Sepultura record up there.

I fucking hate the papyrus font.  Its hideous.  I’ve hated it for years, and I’ve ranted about my hatred into many an uncaring ear.  It’s a Microsoft Word font that looks dated the second you type a letter.  It is supposedly elegant, but using a Microsoft Word default font to define your “elegance” is like putting on one of those “hot body in a bikini” shirts then telling everyone that you actually DO have a hot body.

My first time coming across the font, I was around 16 years old, and I was looking for something to use on the cover of a CD-R I was burning of a Camel album.  Camel is a faux Pink Floyd shitty band and burning CD’s of their music will inevitably land you in Papyrus territory, the domain of shitty bands, christian bookmarks, organic groceries/perfumeries/drycleaners, and uhh…things like this:

via Papyrus Watch

Anyway, as I made my awful Camel CD-R packaging, I came across the font and thought, wow!  What a great font to use for the COVER I’m DESIGNING for this awesome PROG-ROCK CD-R I’m burning!  Are you starting to see the mindset of a Papyrus user?  So I finished the cover, looked at what I had done, marveled at my genius, then (thankfully) caught myself, realized how fucking stupid the whole thing was, cancelled the CD in Nero and put on Formulas Fatal to the Flesh by Morbid Angel.

Ahh, with that, we can move forward.

Anyway, In college I used to work at an internet radio station.  The station was staffed by bookish weirdos, date rapists, and kids in back braces.  It was the Garbage Pail Kids (Ryan West excluded) running online shows for their parents and two other mutants in their hometown of Beloit, WI to hear.  I’d like to think I was one of the few “cool” kids involved, but really I was just another variation on the dork/dweeb/spazz theme.  There was one kid, whose name I will change, lets call him (Z)Evan.  I absolutely despised Zevan, partly because he was a smarmy little prick with a face that could fit a thousand fists, partly because he loved ZWAN, and wouldn’t shut up about it.  Ok, it was mainly because he loved Zwan…seriously…who listens to Zwan?  People who like the Papyrus font.

Anyway, there was some kind of design discussion going on, and I pulled out my old routine blah blah blah papyrus, and he looks me straight in the face and says “Oh man, I LOVE the papyrus font”.  Blood filled my eyes, my hands turned to bricks.  If only he knew how close he came to becoming a vessel for my years of misplaced anger.  That close.

Between the Camel incident, the countless awful coffee shop signs and business cards emblazoned with it, and the fact that THIS kid was a supporter, my hatred was eternally sealed.  I would hate the Papyrus font for the rest of my natural born life, and anything written in it would immediately be translated to “This (book/movie/album/organic cous-cous) was created by a Zwan-loving asshole”.

Or so I thought…

Lets switch gears here for a second.  I’ve covered “Things I Despise”, now lets swing to the other end of the spectrum.  If you were to ask me, at any age (from age 8-27), what my favorite film of all time was, my answer would be invariably ALIENS.  On an off-day, it would be Predator, but for 364 days out of every year of my life, Aliens has been my favorite movie.  It’s near perfect in its pacing, characterization, script, story, production design, cinematography blah blah blah.  Simply put, it rules.  Next to Robocop, I think it is one of the greatest action movies of all time, and I will never bump it from my number one spot.  I could go on for hours, but I will spare you.

A little bit further down the list of Awesome Movies I Will Quit Work to Watch on TBS is Terminator 2.  Its SUPER Blockbuster-y, but not because it cheaply plays on our desires to watch stuff blow up, but because it tackles big subjects like time-travel, the end of the world, our perceptions of the word “villain” and comes out at the end with only the tiniest bit of cheese dripping from it.  Then there is the first Terminator, which is way darker and grainier than you remember.  In terms of tone, its the better movie.

Anyway, amateur film analysis should be written in the papyrus font, so I will cool it for a second.  But, to make the connection, all of these films were created by James Cameron.  James Cameron has made some great fucking movies.  Aliens, Terminator (1 and 2), The Abyss, even Titanic has its place.  Now, he’s coming out with Avatar.

And what is that font at the end of the trailer?  BOOM!  PAPYRUS!  JAMES CAMERON JUST KICKED THE WORLD IN THE FACE WITH A SIX BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (“he spent our entire economic stimulus package on Avatar” – Ogre) WITH A SIX DOLLAR MICROSOFT WORD DEFAULT FONT.  What is this?  Is Avatar a movie or a vegetarian three bean cruelty free lentil chili?

Fuck you James Cameron.  You’ve thrown me into the greatest crisis of my life on earth.  To date.

I can’t lie.  This movie (though the script and plot was obviously written entirely in the Papyrus font as well) looks awesome.  I’m being straight up, drunk-honest here, the trailer gave me chills, especially when the word “ALIENS” came on the screen.  The graphics look sick, the action looks almost too big to comprehend, and no matter how much James Cameron is insulting my intelligence by carelessly packaging his own sentiments about The War into a blue-skinned propaganda film, I will still be seeing this movie.  Probably more than once.  Which brought me to an equation, the mathematical equation at the core of my being that, once solved, will be the agent of my undoing (like a Dan Brown novel, only gay-er and more pointless).

My Love for James Cameron Movies > My Hatred for the Papyrus Font

But not by much.

With that said.  Fuck you James Cameron, you could have picked a better font.  Also, fuck you, guy who invented the papyrus font, because you brought me to this place.  I have now transferred all of my hatred to you sir.  Whoever you are, because you allowed your faux-egyptian bullshit font to infect the mind of a decent man like James Cameron, whom I have sworn allegiance to for most of my life (even if I haven’t seen Dark Angel), I am making it my life’s goal to find you and kill you.   You can have ZEvan, you can have all of the horrible wedding invitations and sweet-corn-exfoliating scrubs in the world, but shame on you for taking James Cameron.  You better be a dead pharaoh or something buried in a pyramid or something.  Actually even if you are, I will find you, dig you up and fuck you up all over again.

Fuck you.  That is all.