I've been neglecting this blog and took a hiatus from drawing when I came home from a trip abroad at the end of February due to job-hunting-- mainly, I felt guilty using any free time I had to do anything but look for a job. 

Now that I am employed again (at a law library-- my first day is this upcoming Monday, eek!), I've been putting ink to paper again and have resumed with journaling my travels around Asia with Colin. 

Random note: I've recently treated myself by buying this pen. I've heard a lot of good things about the Pentel Brush Pen before, but haven't been able to justify its price (okay, I know $14 for a pen isn't THAT expensive, but it is compared to Sharpies and Micron Pens). The Pentel Brush Pen is AWESOME. I've used brush pens, specifically from the Micron line, a lot before when I've been too lazy to use an inkwell/actual brush, but having actual hairs instead of a felt brush makes a whole world of difference in inking! Also, the Pentel Brush Pen takes refills when it runs out of ink, so it's actually pretty cost-effective. 
I looooooooove it.

Here is the first 1.5 days of the trip. It's going to be a long time to document the entire thing, but I'm chipping away at it. 

Finishing this travelogue will take a while, but I'm enjoying the process so far. 
With it taking so long and having not even documented 2 full days of this trip yet though, China, Korea, and Japan seem so far away. 

In any case, here's a souvenir from Korea-- in order to go to the JSA at Panmunjom, you have to sign a waiver saying you won't scoff at North Koreans or, most importantly, point at them. Also, that the United Nations Command isn't accountable if you get shot/killed:

Since the histories between the U.S., Taiwan, China, South Korea and Japan are so  deeply intertwined and have affected each other so much (Cultural Revolution, Korean War, WWII, etc), I hope to be able to have that come across in my travelogue as it develops futher.

I've been waiting since HIGH SCHOOL for this book to come out. 
Seven. Whole. Years! 
Seven years of constantly checking his blog and seeing what new benchmark had been made (like the 500 page mark). Finally- 672 pages of an amazingly masterfully crafted, gorgeous work in my possession. I read it over this past weekend, and am already looking forward to re-reading it. 

The design of the book, the calligraphy, the storytelling, and the drawings are all equally breathtaking. It's not a comfortable read, being very dark in multiple ways (one of them being the multiple sex scenes, including those involving rape and a sex with a child), and the story is largely propelled by agony and loss - but it's beautiful regardless. 

Drawing influence from Arabic calligraphy, Islamic art, and the Koran, the artistry in the book- from start to finish- is a marvel. I can't even IMAGINE the kind of dedication and perseverance and SKILL it takes to be able to be so meticulous with each and every page, especially with something this voluminous. All six hundred and seventy two pages. By one single person. With just paper, rulers, pens, ink and one's own hands. It's kinda inspirational when I'm in a productive mood, and discouraging when I'm not (the ole, 'I'm never going to be able to produce anything as amazing or just-plain good as this! Why bother doing anything?')

In any case, I got my copy of Habibi on its release day, and got it signed-- so it's pretty much one of the most awesome things I own now. 

Also got a fan snapshot (which, believe me, I would not have had the balls to have gotten if it wasn't for everybody else getting them, and because Thompson seemed really gracious about it and happy to oblige us all) . 

Oh yeaaaaaah, soakin' up the talent by osmosisss.

If I ever produce something half as good as that book, I'd be satisfied with myself for the rest of my life. 
Welp, have my goals set. 

Here's an example of me feeling creatively discouraged:

Here's me breaking out the ink jar [and out of the funk] and scratching out a drawing:

Kinda similar to my last one, but this one is based off of being in Venice, while the other Bruges. On a canal kick, I guess.

This one I did today is based on how there's been this bamboo plant growing in a small glass soft drink bottle in my house now for what seems like forever-- probably for 10 years now. I've never paid much attention to it until recently, when I noticed how top-heavy it looked.
Not having quite fully outgrown its container yet, but silly-looking nonetheless.

And this is me playing around with color from a few days ago, which isn't my "thing" typically, but I still enjoy experimentation. 
I personally think that the first set works, and the second set doesn't at all. Trial and error, is all. 

What's come out of these experiments is a potential idea for a new project. Maybe one that I can actually finish! I just have to actually get started, heh. I'm still milling around with it, and feel guilty working/thinking about it sometimes when I should be doing schoolwork, but I'll find a more comfortable balance soon enough. 

I've been busy. 

My summer internship with the Whitney is going well! I've been enjoying my time there a lot, enjoying the various projects I'm working on, and learning a lot from the various seminars/trips we've been scheduled for (so far we've had seminars with a few Whitney curators, their General Counsel, Chief Marketing/Communications Officer, Head of Education, Head of Publications, etc; bright and early tomorrow we have a trip scheduled to the New Museum). 

Besides that, I also recently interviewed with the ACLU National Archives, and will be interning there this fall (for school credit, hurrah!!). 

And besides that, I've been wanting to travel more. 
To remedy that, I've been exploring more of NYC lately (walking a WHOLE LOT every day), visiting the High Line, Hudson River park, East Village, Coney Island (mermaid parade!), and lots & lots & lots of Chelsea. 

Colin and I also took a day-trip to Philadelphia last weekend, which had been both of our first times in Philly and had been on the agenda for a while. First stop was to the Yards Brewing Company (a Philadelphia microbrewery) for some Yards beer and free brewing tour:

Can't leave without actually sampling some beer, right? 
Not counting the free beer samples during the tour, that is...

Shared a flight, which is a tasting of their Signature line of  beers 
(there's also a flight option of their Revolution line beers, which are their 3 presidental ales and the love stout-- but we went with the signatures). 

Afterwards, we walked around and did some usual touristy things.

As far as this (long) weekend goes, I have no idea where to go. 
What's a good day trip-- no overnighting, unless if there's a campground-- from Princeton, NJ? Cape May, maybe? 

As a side project for the summer, I've been tackling this guy and chronicling the progress: 

I imagine my next post to just be photo progressions of this thing.

Returning back from break (even though I didn't actually go anywhere for the holiday) is kind of rough-- but having a short break from work & school was most excellent. I can ::just:: hear my assignments calling me to brush up on actionscripting and to quit this darn blogging... 
(I hate actionscripting).

I helped my brother, who came back home from school for a few days over the Thanksgiving break, make pumpkin cheesecakes on Thanksgiving Eve. Turns out, a hugely disgusting amount of cream cheese-- pounds and pounds of the stuff-- goes into cheesecakes...

There were no cheesecakes left by Saturday. Not a single one.

Brother was in charge of making, well, everything Thanksgiving-meal related, from mashed potatoes to stuffing to sweet potatoes to gravy to the turkey.  


We got the smallest turkey we could find, which was still a 16 pounder. It actually turned out to be an appropriately sized bird, and was pretty much completely eaten by the end of the Thanksgiving meal ( held at my cousin/bff !'s house, with lots of family friends invited, including my neighbors-- the adults just made the entire day a majong-playing day). 

Despite my vegetarianism, I found the turkey-cooking process wholly fascinating:

After posting those snapshots up, all I can see is: 

End result. 
It smelled great. 
I miss turkey. 

The stuffing and mashed potatoes were good though. And the green veggies. And the cheesecake. Goodness I want more pumpkin cheesecake (::whine:: despite the amount we made, all I had was a small sliver). Oh well- there's always Christmas for more pastries and foodstuffs.  

What happens when I give in to my cats: 

And a non-cynical (break from my ole- blah blah blah Stolen land! The death of millions of Native Americans! The slaughter of millions of turkeys! Boo, why do we even celebrate this holiday?!) reflection on Thanksgiving:

Tommy's an indoor cat, but loves to go outside to explore and hang out in the backyard.

He's smart and knows how to climb up to my second-floor bedroom windowsill-- that's where he sits until I notice him and let him back into the house.
He's dumb because he gets into territory fights with the neighbor's cat. Granted, he's never been seriously hurt though. This is as hurt as he's ever been, and he looks fine-- just goofy. The scratch isn't an open bloody wound, doesn't seem infected. It just looks like he's been shaved of a bit of fur. Serves him right for being a bully. 

I'm attempting to work on/start a painting now as a side project, but we'll see how that goes with juggling work and school (finals looming, yay!). Also looking into summer internships (which I thought I'd be getting a head start on, but seems like I may be starting a little late? Or right on time...).

So, this weekend is unofficially (?) me and Colin's 3rd anniversary, hence the drawing of the boy. I say unofficially because we've never really decided on which date to deem an anniversary date or which milestone event made our relationship a relationship.

He suggests making my birth date (next week) our anniversary date for easy remembering. Boys.
Besides, what would happen if he forgot my birthday one year? That's shooting yourself in the foot twice.

In any case though, we met on Halloween weekend, so I guess Halloween weekend is our anniversary now. To be honest, I kinda need an easy date to remember these sort of things as well. It's also pretty unofficial because neither of us reeeally care about celebrating these things. It's been a very good three years though. 

We're going away to DC this weekend though! And being a 'special event' weekend (haha) just gave us reason to actually book a place downtown. We're staying at a place 2 blocks away from the White House. 

But yes, I'm pretty excited about the Rally To Restore Sanity in DC this weekend, especially with the release of the sneak peak at the day's schedule.

We're planning on making the drive down to DC from NJ early Saturday morning (4am?), and abandoning the car at one of the first Metro stations we'll hit (either Greenbelt, College Park, or maybe Cheverly or Deanwood, depending on which route we take while driving down). If we leave by 4am, hopefully we'll make it in to downtown by 9am. It's just really unpredictable, with the traffic and all. If even half of half of the estimated 100k people are driving (I imagine a lot of people taking buses, and a lot of people carpooling), it's going to be a lot of cars on the road that morning. Then again, a lot of people are traveling down Friday night. Ah well.  

Also, Halloween. I love Halloween! Or maybe I just love candy. Too bad most of Halloween day will be spent on the road, traveling back to NJ by car, and then to NY by train for me.

But, in honor of Halloween, here's a quick drawing of a creepy ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life support) dummy that we have around here at work, which we use for training students. Sketch was done as I was proctoring an exam yesterday with this plastic-latex guy on my table. I used a ballpoint pen and a red exam-marking pen.

Humble little comic about a humble little experience.
Click either on "fullscreen" on top, or magnify on bottom (suggested), to actually be able to read.  

This comic may or may not be based on a true story.

On a more random note, earlier this week was my friend Sean's birthday.
& according to him, Kat and I gave him "probably the best present he's ever got" (coughcoughwacomcoughcough). The present comes with a condition that he actually has to use it though, and so that we can perhaps sometime collaborate on some animation project or other (since I know nothing about animation/film, and he's taking class. I'm, er, learning Flash though? I can motion tween?).

Which segues into the video below-- apparently Jim Woodring's surrealist Frank comics have inspired the production of Frank animations (with permission), and the project is collectively known as Visions of Frank: Short Films by Japan's Most Audacious Animators. A lot of them are on YouTube, and are pretty great (I especially dig the one below; you must watch). Since Frank is a wordless comic, the videos are too.

Regarding wordless comics, which there really aren't enough of in the world, I'm really digging the concept and am looking to dabble in it more. The juxtaposition of text WITH images is great and necessary for most comics, but Woodring's sequential art is strong enough to stand on its own- he knows how to speak in the universal language of just images. As a child of immigrants without strong English-language skills, it'd be great to one day make a work that can they can read if it transcends the boundaries set by language.

Woodring recently was the winner of the The Stranger's "Genius Award", and I dig his acceptance speech and what he has to say about wordless literature:

"THERE IS a controversy I have to address. I know some people feel that giving the Stranger Genius award for literature to the creator of comic books, and wordless comic books at that, is a travesty.

The redoubtable Charlie Kraft spoke for many when he posted the following on Facebook:

'I just read that Jim Woodring received a Stranger "Genius Award" for literature. Have any of the cartoon characters he draws ever uttered anything? Was it literature? Had I been a judge for this I would have given The Stranger "Genius" award for literature to a writer, maybe David Stoez or Doug Nufer, not to a guy who draws mutes. If I was Jim W. I would accept this prize then turn around and and give $1,000 each to five deserving local writers and poets. Five persons who toil away with words, not pictures. Those who think cartoonists who don't even use word balloons are entitled to cash awards for "literature" can un-friend me right now and go get in line for another tattoo. You've been so dumbed down by hipster culture you think Archie and Veronica is Crime and Punishment.'

Well, part of me agrees with this; after all, it's the default position. But the part of me that is more, oh, progressive thinks that the Stranger may be ahead of the curve here. They've gone and said that a wordless comic book can be rightfully considered literature, and it falls to you and me to prove otherwise. The question, obviously, is Does literature require words to exist?

Well, now that I think about it, no, I don't think it does. I would go so far as to say Milt Gross' 1930 wordless novel He Done Her Wrong is as much literature as the hackneyed melodramatic plot it tells in pictures. It never occurred to me to care whether He Done Her Wrong was literature before, but, now that you mention it, why not? Perhaps it's only literature in a theoretical or technical sense, like non-musical music or a printed painting. In which case, who cares?

But I don't think the Stranger is playing an elite prank here. I think they see that we are living in a transitional period where traditional categories are melting, blending together. Boundaries everywhere are being dissolved. A high school kid can choose to be either standard gender, or make up a new one. An utter dullard can be the life of the party online. Strictures that no longer need to exist are evaporating. Liberation and paralysis are merging.

Personally I don't think that it's a coincidence that the computer has emerged and become ubiquitous just at the moment when humanity has everything so mapped out and pinned down that the sense of a future has effectively vanished. I think the computer is training wheels for that unborn generation who will live outside the world and ultimately outside the computer, in a state of secular empathetic samadhi. The blurring of the line between the drawn image, the written word, the video and the game is disturbing, but nothing can stop it, and I salute the Stranger for their far-reaching and prophetic vision.

The question of whether I personally deserve this is open to debate. But I think I do, and I can sure use the money. Thank you."