Ok. That totally sucked. Here’s the skinny. The site got hacked early this week. Infected with bad code, malware, general hacker obnoxiousness. So the site was chloroformed, quarantined, and branded an “attack site” by Google… arrgh! A few frantic days later, with considerable help from my superb hosting service, pair.com, the WordPress community, and after a total reinstall of the blog, it’s all sorted. phew… Google has released the blog back into the general population…

The whole experience was galvanizing. First off, for anyone with any kind of a Internet presence – seriously – get to know the details of your security, and make sure it’s tight. Slightly paranoid geek tight, not 70′s suburban bicycle chain tight. The weird thing, though, was dealing with Google. !#@!$@! It underscored how much power they have over our online lives and I’ll tell you, it was disconcerting. I’m going to post on this aspect of the magilla in a few days once I have my thoughts together, but it had a real Soviet Logan’s Run Smiling Robot Takeover Westworld kinda feeling… more soon.

Welcome back.

Reader! Casual visitor! Information collecting robot with a stealth marketing agenda! Over the next couple of days the blog will be undergoing some remodeling. The big change is the addition of a tumblr feed over there on your left… It will be a sketch-booky type thing, a place for quick hits, one-offs, odds & sods. During the jury-rigging stuff will blink in and out, flicker, and sputter. Posts will continue as usual. Enjoy

Due to a looming fever and a tsunami of advertising the blog will be going on auto-pilot for the balance of the week. In the meantime, I’ve asked these two fetching pictures of Joan Collins to stand in for actual content. Til monday then…

? …well, now you know, in case it comes up this weekend. Till Mon, then…

Still buried deep in the sequin mines. Sigh. As such, it’s re-runs all week, featuring posts from the blog’s struggling first season.

Just gorgeous! Brian Stauffer’s lovely, evocative, spare drawing for the March 1, 2010 cover of the New Yorker.

Reader! May your weekend be as light, refreshing, and effervescent as the sensation of Djer Kiss talcum powder, which, if you can trust the depiction above, feels like the condensed essence of an idyllic verdant garden at the foot of a towering magic castle from which issue 38 faeries, attended by 3 mischievous cherubs, all luxuriating in a river of flowers…. ‘Till next week then…

I know, Hallmark® holiday, yes, yes… still, love’s rad. Happy Valentines Day, all…

‘Aight… once more with feeling. And, as always, with an eye for something fetching. Well fortified over the holiday break.  Visits to two crackerjack museums: first to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where I was blown away by Birth of the Cool, the Barkley L. Hendricks retrospective; then to the Brandywine River Museum, for the Wyeths of course, but also for a little jewel of a show – a survey of illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

Books too; finally scored Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz - the single best LA writer writing about LA ever, also Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby a pioneering black & white strip comic, Nell Brinkley’s effervescent flappers, and Exposed, a survey of the Victorian nude published a few years back. Other radness: The paintings of William Merrit Chase, some spellbinding and uncannily modern illustrations for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , Godard’s pop headcratcher flick Made in USA…

Also, a big new gouache completed at long last. Scores galore while visiting family HQ… old slide rule manuals (see above), a passel of old scientific tracing templates, a collection of precision tweezers, and the germ of giant new project of moon shot proportions. More soon, like tomorrow, with covers from the 70′s toddler edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or maybe the gouache. We’ll see.

(Jessie Wilcox Smith, Alice in Wonderland, 1923)

Hi. Happy & huzzah to you and yours. Back around the 4th. Help yourselves to a cocktail.
(Ed Ruscha, Not a Bad World, Is It?, 1984)

Dim and muddled the day after the office holiday party. In that spirit, allow me, reader, to record here on the internets something obvious, yet necessary: I miss Gillian Anderson and we are poorer for her absence. There. Till next week then….

Gone advertising, back Wednesday. Help yourselves to anything.
Stephen Shore, Room 34, Timberline Motel, Banff, Alberta, 1974

In the late 70′s, when I was 9 or so, I staged these UFO photographs. They were taken on the front lawn of our house in Liverpool NY, a suburb of Syracuse. They turn up every few years or so – a welcome wormhole to kidhood.

Like the photos themselves, though, my affinity for them has mellowed and deepened over the years. Thinking about them now, I’m as taken with the idea of staging UFO pictures as the idea of UFOs themselves. They capture a profound human dynamic – the craftiness of inventing our own stories as well as the longing that they actually be true. Dwelling amid that tension is much more satisfying, I think, than being either a gimlet eyed sceptic or a wide eyed true believer.

Untitled, Daniel Bedell, 2009

There are few sensations as vivid and satisfying as applying tincture of iodine to a cut, scrape or nick. The dark amber apothecary bottle stands in welcome contrast to most remedies today. There has been no attempt to make its presentation friendly and welcoming, instead it remains a clear and sober statement of purpose.

Its application suggests equal parts magic and science – you extract a thin glass wand, clinking as you draw it past the inside rim of the bottle. Surface tension binds a shimmering, clinging slick of the stuff to the wand. It feels nearly alive (a bit like the black oil in the X-Files, actually) as it sloughs off onto your skin. Immediately its penetrating sting blooms in successive waves – it’s palpable efficacy in stark contrast to the crude harsh burn of rubbing alcohol or the clammy glop of Neosporin. The job done, it sets fast its translucent red ochre stain – a signature and endorsement of work done, and done well.

Away, advertising, etc… back Thursday. Make yourself at home. Till then, then.