A few years ago, Emily Glaeser helped me photograph a bunch of my puppets, many with various states...open mouth, closed mouth, flat. And I'm finally getting around to doing something with them. I tried posting animated gifs, but Blogger doesn't support them. Maybe I'll slowly get around to posting them on Savage Monsters or davesavage.net. (Not sure why the pics are looking kinda blotchy. Click on them to see a bigger better pic.)
For the most, I'd say that meetings are a waste of time. Except that it gives me time to doodle, which I highly enjoy. Both of these are from approximately 2 years ago. Not sure what either meeting was about. I'd like to say the one that says "conflict" was the meeting about "conflict resolution," but I found those "notes" later on the same legal pad. This must've been from the meeting where we were told that there would be a meeting about "conflict resolution."
I slept fine while I was trying to watch TV; now I can't sleep. My voodoo doodles from the attic are getting to me. (Sharpie and highlighters on paper. Once again, something I did when I should've been working.)
At my last job, I worked for a company that did a lot of health-related government grant stuff. Some of the projects were fun, at least in theory...board games and websites teaching kids about the negative effects of drugs, alcohol and tobacco. A lot of the fun was squashed out of the projects (sometimes for good reason, most of the time not), which gave me no end of frustration. One of my diversions was making stuff and putting it up around the office. The "Greatest Gift You Can Give A Bedwetter Is Beer" poster gave me a lot of amusement. One night, it disappeared. A coworker told me that my boss took it down and said that higher ups in the company had complained about it. Possible, but not likely. (He's a whole other story. Or possibly a book.) The "Cannibulemia" poster stayed up for quite awhile. A lady from another department saw it, read it, then said, "Oh, I didn't know we had that project." Never ceases to amaze me what people will believe.
A story I wrote about Godzilla in 4th grade for Mr. Fincham's English class. Another assignment was to write a story from the perspective of a pair of shoes. Most kids wrote about their Keds or girls wrote about ballet slippers. I wrote about a pair of baby shoes and the kid in the story was flushing them down the toilet and stuff like that. It went over really well in class; the kids were cracking up. I was really proud of that story. Surprisingly, my mother (who has always thought I should be a writer) told me that "it wasn't that great."
The more I think about it, I realize I've created a bunch of stuff for no real reason or purpose other than I felt compelled to make it. Case in point: a paper mache 2 headed baby. Initially it was supposed to be a pinata, but I didn't plan it too well and it would've been too much of a pain to get the armature of plastic bottles out.
In 2004, I was part of a huge group show in DC called Art-O-Matic. I think somewhere around 600 artists displayed work in an old building shortly before it was to be gutted and turned into condos. My friends Kirk Waldroff and Kim Bentley told me about it and I signed up at the last minute without a clue as to what I'd show. I ended up just filling a wall with existing paper bag puppets. To hang them, I punched a hole at the top of each one and crimped a metal grommet in the hole and just hung them from nails in the wall. The "Take One" sign refers to the box of business cards just below it, not the puppets. I was selling the puppets for $10 a pop. And I sold a few. I constantly wonder, what the hell am I gonna do with these things? They're kinda cool, but they're made out of compulsion rather than desire to make archival works of art for sale. No idea how long they'll last; they're just brown paper bags with Sharpie marker. Some are colored with highlighters, white out or Prismacolor pencils.
A few more puppets from the archive. Not sure of the dates on these, but they're probably between 2000-2004. Probably 2000-2001, I really got into a groove making these on my lunch hour when I worked at Funny Garbage. I ate at La Conqita a lot and got a loads of brown paper bags from those lunches....red beans, yellow rice topped with stewed pork or beef stew. Also great food at LaHore Deli, but they used plastic bags, not really suited to my needs.
Just got back from NYC Sunday night. I flew American Airlines which luckily has white, non-plastic barf bags, so I was able to make barf bag puppets coming and going to NYC. The one above is from the return flight and it doesn't have the flap where you can make the mouth open and close. At some point, I'd like to do something with all the paper bag puppets I've made over the years. At last count, I had 500+. Not sure what the current count is, but my production of them has certainly fallen off in the past year or so.
Saxton Moore convinced me to start a blog, so here it goes. I've got tons of projects in the works, zines, trading cards, buttons, websites....so much stuff that it's hard to focus on one thing. I just got some stickers made, I used the same design as I did for my temporary tattoos. So much easier to produce an existing image than figuring out and financing some of the more involved projects. I'd like to do a set of trading cards based on the Alphabeasts that are on my site. When I told a friend about the cards, he mentioned making them lenticular so they animate. The project is on the back burner for the moment. Gotta get the motivation to do all the art, then figure out how and where to get them produced. And then there's the small matter of paying for them.
