Archives: 2009 January

Archives: 2009 January

street art

January 30th, 2009

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wowee, two comics in a month :/

January 29th, 2009

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the author

January 22nd, 2009

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Pork Chop Robinson #6

January 14th, 2009

I finished this last Friday night

http://brokenpants.com/zinelist.php

Pork Chop Robinson #6
drawn fall 2008
24+ pages of comics and doodles
silkscreened two color cover…!

I got a silkscreen kit for Christmas and used it to do the covers:

Also got this printer which is cool and convenient but has an unfortunate tendency to smell like burning:

Anyway, it’s pretty awesome, a ton of the stuff I’ve been drawing for the last few months collected and compiled and lookin all sexy. Look for it at Quimby’s in Wicker Park and Comix Revolution in Evanston, or email me if you want me to mail you one: stopmakingsteve@gmail.com

http://brokenpants.com/zinelist.php

stopmakingsteve Posted incomics and books, diy, saying swears | 1 Comment »
Infinite Jest rules

January 12th, 2009

Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who’ve gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul’s core systems — these persons know firsthand that there’s more than one kind of so-called ‘depression.’ One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia or simple melancholy. It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . . . well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. i.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.

…

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

I haven’t drawn a single thing since like… before Christmas, which sucks, especially since I was so productive for such a pretty long little time this fall. A not insignificant factor in this, for the last week at least, is that I’ve been really hung up on this damn cinder block of a novel: Infinite Jest. It’s really hilarious and insightful and other good adjectives etc and sort of makes me wish I were a writer and could come up with cool sentences.

The fact that for me DFW’s suicide, which led to his obituaries which led to me finding out about the book in the first place, somehow endears him to me and makes him more worthy of my respect is something that I’m not really willing to unpack right now.

Anyway, it’s an awesome book! I’m wearing it down pretty quickly.

Also, now I kind of want to get a tattoo, or at least have a stronger notion to get this tattooed than anything ever before, a tattoo that says “HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH!?” haha

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