Avram's journal

Wow, I felt like utter crap this morn— no, this afternoon when I finally woke up. Staying up till 5 AM will do that, I guess, but no, this was even crappier than the usual day-after-five-ay-em feeling.

My first thought was that I’m just getting old, and need to stop staying out that late. Cue thoughts about leaving Games Club early, or skipping it altogether, followed by wondering what I’d need to do for a social life if I did that.

But no, actually, I’ve been sleeping badly all week, so I was probably just sleep deprived on top of the lateness. I realized a couple of days back that what I need to do is cut out the ginormous Starbucks iced coffees that I’d been having in afternoons to celebrate the arrival of spring. I’m demoting coffee to a before-noon drug from now on, except in cases of emergency or if I know I’m gonna wanna stay up late. Tea and cola should still be OK.

(Yeah, this turns out to be another one of those entries I write mostly for my own future reference.)

And I need to hunt through my Tom Waits albums to see if any of them has “Jockey Full of Bourbon” on it.

I dunno, I’ve been kinda mopey recently, but today felt great. I know the exact moment it turned around: I was getting ready to do some shopping, and I wanted some music. I managed to find my CD player (which had been eluding me for several months), and I popped in Mark Knopfler’s Sailing to Philadelphia, and the moment the opening notes of “What It Is” hit my ears, I felt like all was right with the world. Thanks, kent_allard_jr! It didn’t hurt that the day was sunny and (relatively) warm.

After shopping, I went to Ground. Chatted a bit with the cute new barrista. Coffee with Splenda is starting to taste good to me. Finished off the Jack Staff book, and man, that was just great. It’s like reading a British Astro City, but more condensed, with the stories all tightly packed and interwoven. And, as I mentioned, with a great sense of design. And that shaded-nose thing he goofs up in Kane? He gets it working in Jack Staff

I also read the second (and, I think, last) volume of FLCL. There’s an intriguing visual drive to it — that’s what attracted me to the book in the first place — but man, it’s just sloppy and incoherent on both the plot and storytelling levels. I hope the anime is better than the manga. The art seems cleaner, anyway.

( And I did some sketching. )

Today’s lesson: Unsweetened coffee tastes disgusting. Under Atkins, I can have milk in my coffee, but not sugar or honey. I think I’m going off coffee for a couple weeks.

( Sketchbook dump )

Y’know what I used to hate about commercial radio? How they’d just cycle the same forty or so Billboard chart hits over and over again. Y’know what I hate about alternative net.radio? How they just cycle the same forty or so alternative rock hits over and over. Anyone know of a free net-radio feed from a station that has a huge music library from lots of different genres and just plays whatever they think is cool? Sorta like Vin Scelsa does? (Sadly, Vin won’t let his show go out on the net, because of the limitations the FCC would put on him.)

I’m feeling better now; got some good sketching done. I really like how I got the girl’s hair in the upper-right of this image — the one that looks like it’s all hair, like a darker Cousin It. I’m fond of how I got the highlights working. There’s a bit of a Robert Crumb feel to that.

( Sketches from Ground )

I also like some of the stuff that I haven’t scanned in, some character designs that worked pretty well.

Grr, no comics today! Sure, the new comics were out, but there was nothing I wanted to buy. I even spent about twenty minutes looking through the trade paperback shelves for something interesting that I hadn’t already read. No dice. So it’s Wednesday and I’ve no new comics to read and thus the world is fundamentally out of whack.

It wasn’t a totally wasted day, though. I stopped in at the Java & Jazz (closing this Sunday, sadly) for a big cuppa joe, and really liked the artwork they had up this week. The guy’s name is Craig Anthony Miller, and his work looks like stained-glass graffiti, and it filled my head with ways of reconciling my cartooning impulses with my desire to paint.

And someone new showed up at NYSFS — Carol, an old NYUSFS friend I hadn’t seen in years. She took a while to recognize me without all my hair.

( Sketchbook dump )