I am now selling my art on Etsy. I just barely opened up shop yesterday so I still haven’t worked out all the kinks and made it look perfect, but now it’s finally here. I am starting out small (literally) with a few packs of pins I made. I am planning on putting up some paintings and prints soon as well.
Once we start making Dabbers art and merchandise it will also be listed on my Etsy shop for sale. Hopefully that will be happening sooner rather than later – now if we could just get a record label to pick us up with our freshly mastered album…hmm.
Click below on the cute little dog button to be taken to my new shop I decided to affectionately name”Ice Cream Kitten”.
I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction circa 1940’s-50’s and I’ve been really really soaking it in on all sorts of levels (as you can see below it has seeped into my cartoon-ish aesthetic). I never really knew that I even liked sci-fi literature until I picked up these last three:
Rax, Michael Coney More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
They are all incredible books and I’m surprised that they are really considered sci-fi because they run so deep on so many levels. They are truly great pieces of literature, and aren’t at all dated by the era that they were written. I used to assume that most science fiction consisted of silly outdated predictions of the future, or outlandish ideas of what humans and earth and aliens would be like, but instead I’ve discovered a whole world of books that are strange little head-trips about life itself and are truly moving and eerie. Definitely not consisting of the classic and cliche post-apocolyptic water-world trashed New York scenery that I thought most sci-fi books were about. What a great discovery!
And here is a poster of the next Dabbers show at the Soda Bar to go along with this new exciting theme…
Dropped by the art store today and bought a pack of colored construction paper, then turned our living room into paper shrapnel covered mess – by making this:
Zack made this:
I used the outer space of his circle to make the top portion of mine. Same idea and two really different styles. Monday afternoons are well spent if you have scissors, a big package of construction paper and a purple glue stick (and someone to share these things with). I took photos of them, put them into Photoshop to remove the camera glare & cropped them so they are little bit more digital/pixelated than the originals (obviously).
I’ve been spending the last few months getting nestled and settle into a new place with my dear Z. Our band, The Dabbers, is one of the best parts. We practice in an industrial area of san diego where we can be incredibly loud and vibrate the walls, with no one to complain. Just try to hit a drum beat more than once in a residential cul de sac. Doesn’t fly with the neighbors, trust me on that one.
Being on stage in a two piece is a totally new experience too. Playing with four people (as I did in Braaiins!) allows one to disappear into the mix more, or if you make a mistake, there is often so much background and surrounding noise that the wrong note can melt in with the rest of the music. Stripping it down to just drums and bass keeps me on my toes much more, and allows me to take up as much space on stage as I want since Zack is glued down to a stationary drum kit. I absolutely love it! I’m having such a great time playing this kind of music, whatever one might define it (I’m not sure what the most current music lingo would want to tag us as), and we also aren’t playing so many shows that its exhausting.
We have finished recording all 12 of our songs at
Archival Recording with Mitch Wilson from No Knife, and are going in the studio this thursday to begin mixing. We’re are trying to avoid getting to tedious with this part. Just as Photoshop can completely change the original photo/art into a fabricated piece of computer genius, ProTools can alter the ‘realness’ of a track, transforming a messy chord into a microscopically clean and precise one. This is not what we are aiming for. We want to keep the grit, grime, and flavor, and thankfully Mitch is right on the same page with us (which I have to mention, recording with Mitch has been amazing, he is spot on to what we’re trying to accomplish, and has the most positively engaging attitude and personality about him).
Phew! Well that’s most of it.
Here are the most recent photos from the Casbah show on 3/7/09:
