I wasn’t prepared for any of what’s been happening lately, but I’m doing my best to keep up with it and take it all in stride. My last update was in January for good reason (I’ve been very consistently busy), but every email I send ends with a link to this blog, and I’ve been sending a lot of emails lately. And getting linked a lot too. I think rather than get into EACH and EVERY project I’ve been on lately, I’m going to start with two big ones and touch upon the rest bit by bit.
I’m sorry if this is cryptic… I’m building the suspense.
Rewind back past my last three posts about summer of 2009 (more projects there, too, but I’ll have to get to those later). Everyone is pretty aware by now that I’ve been trying paint murals around Baltimore ever since I moved down here, and I’ve had a fair bit of success with it so far. Most recently I finished a piece for a rec center on the west side. 
Harlem Park Rec Center, in fact, which is owned by Baltimore Recreation and Parks, and is primarily and after-school center for kids. This is based on my second proposal, as my first was rejected for being “too weird and scary”. 
(maybe it’s a little weird)
It took about two months to complete, but it would have been done a lot sooner if not for the Snowmapocolypsageddon we enjoyed/endured midway through February.
I tried to incorporate as many of the activities that go on at the Rec Center as I could, and using bots as stand-ins for equipment helped.
Throughout the job, the kids were pointing out their favorite activities and assigning names of their friends to the different characters. 
Some of the kids didn’t get it though. They were more concerned with why and how someone could have a backboard for a head than why or how someone could have green/purple/blue skin. 
For all interested, the song being played by the trumpeter is “Baltimore”, written by Randy Newman as it was performed by Nina Simone. I recommend looking both versions up on YouTube, especially if you’re from this city.
So yeah, that was fun.
Less known, probably, is my ongoing shoe-customization project. Before I moved to Baltimore (a matter of days before, in fact, I painted a pair of slip-on sneakers and gave them to my brother Christian (who recently went to London but who also does comics and is much funnier than I am) for his 20th birthday.
(it’s a visual metaphor for life, duh)
Fast forwarding… Ashley and Kimberly Ulmer, the two wonderfully talented and motivated ladies responsible for everything that is Green Eyed Monster saw pictures of these shoes and flipped, and have since each gotten a pair of their own and had me do various promotional pairs on behalf of G.E.M. and, I guess, myself as an artist. You can see photos of some of these sneakers (and a weird picture of me) at the G.E.M. site. Most recently, she asked me to do some work for Dooce. ‘Who is Dooce? I’ve never heard of her.’ you might be saying to yourself. You’re not alone, but you’re also very much out of the loop. Such is the way of internet fame.
(Jackson, surveyor of all things internet, pictured with his birthday shoes, is the only of my immediate friends who knew who she was and how big of a deal it would be if Dooce responded)
Dooce (aka Heather Armstrong of SLC Utah, the home of one of my favorite movies from high school) is kind of a big deal in the blog-o-sphere. She’s number 26 most influential woman in the media according to Forbes Magazine (that’s the one all the rich people read. they don’t need a link either), she’s got a word named for her in urbandictionary.com (one that is actually used, not just posted as a gag by your friends while they were drunk), and she’s got millions of readers/twitter followers/facebook friends/ all that stuff. She does mostly cater to the stay-at-home parent crowd (being one herself), but she got famous by tugging at the web’s collective heartstrings with her stories of depression, her battle with skin cancer, her pregnancies, and her experiences with the Mormon chuch (I’m summarizing here, and poorly, but I’m still new to her and haven’t read her full archives which stretch back to 2001). Anyway, Ashley, being a new mom/entrepreneur/blogger herself, is understandable obsessed (obsessed) with this woman and really admires her achievements. So in December she requested that I make…
… not one…
… not two…
… but three distinct pairs of shoes for Dooce!
At first, well, I was kind of annoyed (sorry Ash), but I was broke, busy (how can those two states of being exist simultaneously?!?), and really just generally fed up with working for free. But, I love Ash, and she is NOTHING if not persuasive, so I obliged and sent them off, and waited. And waited. And waited. And then this came in the mail:
That’s Heather’s dog chuck on a homemade postcard!
AND THEN A WEEK LATER THIS HAPPENED. IF YOU HAVEN’T CLICKED ANY OF THE MILLION LINKS I’VE INCLUDED IN THIS FREAKING POST, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CLICK THIS ONE.
That was the 24th of February. Since then I’ve had six (maybe seven?) orders for shoes, several plugs on a few cool websites and lot of other projects. I owe it to myself and to everyone who’s been putting up with and supporting my personal brand of idiocy to document everything that’s going. It’d be a waste not to.
(L to R: Johnny, Baby, and the Babyettes. Photo by Claire Cote)
