trophy wife

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friday robots: anniversary edition

On November 9, 2007, Friday Robots were born. It was a whim; posted hastily-drawn sketches of creatures so bizarre the only name I could give them was "robots." I'd actually been drawing robots for some time, but thanks to this here blog I was able to spread the robot love all around the world. The next Friday it was official: Friday Robots were here to stay.

Two years and 115 'bots later, Friday Robots are still going strong. Today I created a stamp to mark the special occasion. Check out this modern piece of machinery:
As I said, these robots were carved, stamped, then paired with a piece of desert known as the Painted Hills of Oregon. It's crazy, I know: Oregon has desert.

Thank you all for supporting Friday Robots, and here's to another year of human/robot cooperation. High five!

those aren't pillows

As my two favorite blogs both sent out such nice Thanksgiving messages today, I wanted to join in the cheer. Thanks to all of you, my dear readers. Without you I'd just be some crackpot; with you I am a respected blogger. You make all the difference in the world.

It's raining today, making it perfect for staying indoors, watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade as well as a few long-time favorite movies. From all of us at Falling Rock, have a great day.

carver and ernesto as humans

Ever wonder what Carver and Ernesto would look like if they were human? I can't say this is definite, but here are my initial thoughts on the matter:

I noticed, after I chose this photo, that there is a little rainbow effect on the right. Ernesto now stands at the end of the rainbow.

pigeons: gettin' the job done!

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paul mccartney: a life, a review

Part life story, part medical treatise on the long-term mental effects of pot smoking, Peter Ames Carlin's new biography, Paul McCartney: A Life, chronicles the once and future Beatle from his parent's meeting all the way through his latest album, Electric Arguments.

Carlin's book doesn't deal in those oft-repeated "truths" about The Beatles and Paul McCartney, and it never succumbs to nitpicking. It is written by a fan who loves Paul but is not blinded by that love. Carlin has written an engaging, well-researched biography of the Cute Beatle.

While Paul was for years dismissed as a lightweight next to John Lennon, people have finally started to come around. His contribution to the greatest rock band of all time was nothing short of foundational. Without Paul's sense of melody and artistic experimentation, John songs like A Day in the Life or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds would never have achieved their full potential. The Beatles were always a band, and Carlin shows that you can't discount any member of that group. (Even Ringo.)

In spite of Carlin's not being able to speak with Paul directly, he has 50+ years worth of interviews, news articles, books, and of course music to draw from. It really isn't a drawback that the biographer doesn't have direct access to his subject. Paul usually interviews only when he's trying to sell something, and he also tends to be just a bit spacey. Not necessarily bad things in themselves, but it isn't a mixture conducive to introspection.

It also doesn't help that Paul rarely critiques his past work. I would love to sit him down and ask, as an intrepid Playboy interviewer did with John Lennon many years ago, what Paul thinks about every song on every single one of his albums. My friend Andy, a Beatle scholar of utmost integrity, theorizes that Paul doesn't think about his past work. He sure doesn't play the majority of his catalog on tour. If you just saw him live, you'd think he only made about a dozen songs from 1970 to the present. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, whips out a vast assortment of songs on his Neverending Tour, from hits to obscurities.

Paul's desire to be liked, to keep earning his fame, is probably his greatest motivation. I don't think that's a bad thing at all, but it does force him to "forget" a large part of what he's done over the years. As Carlin is quick to point out, sometimes a failure can be just as interesting as a success. Much of his commentary in the book is reserved for Paul's lesser-known works.

Carlin's portrait of Paul is of an inventive, egotistical, creative, musical, artistic, autocratic, blissful, angry, oblivious, hardworking, chipper guy. Because of all his contradictions, Paul comes off as truly human. That is the great success of Carlin's biography. Breezy without being glib, deep without seeming pretentious, A Life presents a Living Legend in all senses of that phrase.

Although I've read more than my share of Beatles commentary, Carlin's biography does shed some new light on that oft-written period of time. While Paul always wants to come off as a nice guy in public, he is a huge star and is used to having his way all the time. That tension is the crux of the Beatles chapters. Paul clearly wanted to become the leader of The Beatles after Brian Epstein died, an ill-advised move that probably led as much to the breakup as Yoko's incessant howling. But it was also his vision that created Beatles out of a group of Liverpool teenagers. So you could say that balances things out.

The part of Paul's life I was most interested in hearing more about, however, came post-Beatles. How can a man who thought up and executed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band produce utter garbage a few years later? Easy! Carlin tells us how:

Paul's problem with putting out consistently good albums seems to be:
1. Big ego, plus
2. an unsureness of his own talent, compounded when
3. his big ego gets doesn't allow him to listen when someone has a bad thing to say about his new songs.

Paul, like all us artists, needs an editor. His best editor, John, was never interested in working with him after the Beatles, and Paul never found another person he could trust as much as John. Paul's reliance on how easy it all came to him was actually a hindrance, allowing him to put out albums regularly without any of the sweat needed to hone a group of songs to perfection. Then, if the album did well (which it usually did in the 1970's, because this is a new Paul McCartney album after all), he'd just assume all was well and continue on his merry way.

I was particularly interested in Paul's brief partnership with Elvis Costello. I really wish he had released the songs they recorded together as-is. Instead, second guessing himself, Paul re-recorded all of them. When they came out (in Flowers in the Dirt and the misbegotten Off the Ground) they had lost their energy.

Sometimes the production got in the way of perfectly good songs, but many times Paul just didn't have anything to say. He was a blogger before his time. At worst, listening through Paul's post-Beatle albums is a fascinating way to chart the moods of one of the most famous people on the planet. Feeling it was his duty to keep making albums, Paul sometimes lost the thread.

But that isn't always the case. Every once in a while he'll release Band on the Run, or Flaming Pie, or the recent Memory Almost Full. (Although for my money, McCartney is still his greatest solo effort.) Albums that, if they were made by a total unknown, would propel him to stardom.

Carlin compiles the story Paul never seems willing to tell. It is the story I've long wanted to hear. What Paul doesn't know is, it is his failings that make him great. It's the fact that he can release (and champion!) Give My Regards to Broad Street as if it were the next A Hard Day's Night. I find it comforting that even a musical genius can have an off day.

I also find it comforting that a book such as this exists. Now I think I'll put my headphones back on and listen.

friday robots

Today's robots were inspired by a photo I took many years ago at the Tower of London:
You could get those self-guided tour CDs and wander around with a disc spinning on your chest. How I wished we could have spinning discs on our chests all the time.

I expanded on my original notion and came up with these guys:
I'm taking suggestions for names. The top one is male and the bottom is female.

national park media

I've been consuming two pieces of National Park entertainment lately. I don't know what serendipity caused this to happen, but I'm happy it did.

Ken Burns turned in his latest opus, a documentary on the national parks called America's Greatest Idea. I've only got through the first episode so far but that was a doozy. The creation of Yosemite first as a state park, then Yellowstone, the first national park, then Yosemite following Yellowstone's lead. Abraham Lincoln signed Yosemite into protection, and Theo Roosevelt was of course the driving force behind Yellowstone. We also get to meet John Muir, perhaps California's greatest environmentalist.

It seems like a recurring theme in this series will be the battle to keep these lands truly protected from farming and development. Given the huge land-to-people ratio this country has, you'd think it would be easy to set aside some of the most beautiful and diverse parts. You'd think that, but you would be wrong. As American as apple pie is our adverse reaction to signs. "I can't graze my cattle here? I'd like to see them sissies out in Washington try and stop me."

This information plays out against historical and recent photographs and film, all of it spectacular. I'm looking forward to future episodes, if only to fill me in on the many national parks I've never heard of.

Of the many new comics introduced to me at APE this year, one especially struck home. Which really says how great it is, given the plethora of inventive and enthralling original works on display.

Phil Frank was a cartoonist (sadly deceased) for the San Francisco Chronicle. His comic strip, Farley, focused entirely on the Bay Area, which is probably why it escaped my attention for so long. However, every summer his characters took a trip out to Yosemite National Park. In this collection, Eat, Drink & Be Hairy, Frank chronicles the "urbanized" bears of Yosemite and the tourists who inadvertently feed them.

Consistently funny, full of lively drawings and well-drawn characters, Farley contained all the merits of a Great Comic Strip. It's especially cool that Farley was a local daily strip. That is a creature as endangered as some of the animals in Yosemite.

Though Falling Rock draws on my experiences in southwestern national parks, it deals with a wider range of topics and is more loosey-goosey with How Things Really Are. I hate realism, is what that boils down to. Though maybe if a newspaper were interested, I could turn Falling Rock into a true local daily strip. It would be an honor to continue in the tradition of a fine comic strip like Farley. Any takers?

bad car good car

Cars, like penguins, have the capacity for both goodness and evil. Do cars have souls? Doubtful, unless they are voiced by Paul Newman. But Saturday I witnessed the extremes of car behavior, and it all happened within a matter of two minutes.

I was on my bike, as is usually the case around these parts. Waiting at an intersection I should have been allowed to cross right away, as there was a crosswalk. Usually, though, cars on this particular road treat crosswalks as though they are speed bumps. Slow down a bit, but go as fast as you can without destroying the shocks.

At this time, there was a man already halfway through the crosswalk as I began to cross. You figure that cars may not slow down enough to see a pedestrian waiting patiently on the sidewalk, but surely they'll stop when a person is directly in front of them. Not so! This guy nearly got hit by a big green SUV. The driver, a surly young man barely paying attention, stopped only because the pedestrian put his hand out and started yelling. The pedestrian told the driver that you have to STOP AT A CROSSWALK FOR CHRISSAKES. The driver acknowledged this with a wave of his hand, not even lucid enough for a middle finger. I really hope that driver's girlfriend just dumped him for his younger brother.

Shaking my head, I rode on.

When I looked up again, it was just in time. A car that had parallel parked was halfway into the road. The driver of that car (a midsize sedan of indeterminate color), leaned out of his window to wave me on. "Go on," his friendly face and extended arm implied, "you've got the right to pass." I smiled and thanked him on the way by.

People don't usually think you can communicate to the outside world once you're in a car, but that is not the case. This driver knew that.

The rest of my trip was uneventful. But in that matter of minutes, I experienced both the worst driving and the nicest. And it wasn't even raining.

did you know?

You can subscribe to the daily episode of Welcome to Falling Rock National Park!

Ever since a wizard over at ProCreate helped me update to a Wordpress site, the daily strip can now be read in any RSS reader.

Say you have a Google homepage. Add a new gadget, then paste in my web address to receive the daily strip. Same with Google Reader, or Yahoo, or any number of feed readers.

Of course you don't get the whole Kid Shay experience by subscribing, but you do get to read every new episode of Falling Rock, hot off the (virtual) press.

friday robots get all moralistic for some reason

Hey, let's check in on Friday Robots! What goofy hijinks are they up to this fine Friday?

Okay, they all seem to be congregating together to form a letter. What is that? An A? A big, scarlet A.It seems the robots have gone 17th Century Massachusetts on us. Oh Hester Prynne, I'm sorry robots are giving you a hard time after all these years.

That's it. No more 700 Club for Friday Robots.

good penguin/bad penguin

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from the sketchbook

It's been a while since I've posted anything from my sketchbook. Here are two Prismacolor drawings. Top: cliffs over the ocean. I might like to try another version with paint. Below: you'll find swirls of pure joy.

friday robots

Micron robots, Prismacolor background. Art geek chic.

a little late for halloween, but

I just finished a story about Ernesto and Carver meeting three witches. Carver wants the witches to tell Ernesto's future.

I'm thinking mid-December will be a good time to run these comics. You know, just in time for the holidays. Oh boy I can't wait!

Here's a teaser to tide you over until then.

rashida, i'm sorry

Here is Rashida Jones, making Anne Hathaway look like a bridge troll by comparison.
I've made no secret that this blog's raison d'être is to propel Rashida Jones into my strong, comforting arms. Mega-stars such as Jones do not associate with unknown bloggers. They may, however, associate with famous bloggers. That's what I'm counting on.

That's why I took it especially hard when I was not selected for the Top Ten cartoonists in Amazon's Comic Strip Superstar contest. I thought for sure it was my ticket to stardom. Heck, it's right there in the name of the contest. Obviously, if I had made it to the Top Ten, then won the Grand Prize, there would be nothing stopping me from meeting my destiny.

Now, however, out of the contest and out of luck, I must find another way to become hugely famous. Rashida, if I should fall behind, will you wait for me?