Kevin Wilson

Johnny Boo

Lately I’ve been paying more attention to posters around Portland. This means I’ve been spotting the influence of James Kochalka, and a lot of simpler, broadly colored art with an undercurrent of a Japanese art style. It works very well for poster art. Posters around here have so very little to do with the show and more to do with creative doodling.  Little monsters and creatures being dreamed up to fill the rest of the page. It’s like fine art in disguise, an empty space that was usually cluttered to death with lots of text and lens flares being emptied to allow an artist to build whatever they want.

Back to the subject: I’ve started looking through some of Kochalka’s work on Top Shelf when I was looking up Alan Moore’s library on the site. I found this preview of the Johnny Boo book on the Top Shelf website. It looks pretty funny and cute.

Next level, I can turn invisible.

It’s been about 3 to 4 years since I’ve become a vegetarian. When people ask why I tell people that I did it for health reason. This is true, but what keeps me a vegetarianism is the reactions I get from people. Between those precious moments that they learn I only do it for health I can watch visions of screaming vegans dancing through their heads.

Although people like to throw around a lot of statistics, including this article that indicates eating animal chemical Neu5Gc can cause health problems, I don’t go out of my way to convert people to vegetarianism. It’s not like I get a commission from the carrot mafia whenever I do this. However, for those people contemplating vegetarianism and need to know the nitty gritty of it, I felt like making this short list drawbacks to eating only vegetables:

1. Prepare to always have to classify yourself and clarify that you’re not a vegan. I rarely hear about people being called out for eating a vegetable at a steak house, but I have gotten a lot of strange looks for eating shrimp and sometimes dairy. I mostly avoid it because I don’t want to become an ovolactoarcacnovegan instead of just a plain vegetarian.
2. Pasta and cheese. Pasta and cheese are the food friends that compliment you to your face then tell your friends your darkest secrets. When you first switch over to being a vegetarian you may start craving starches and carbs in order to quiet your hunger. Since it’s cheap, pasta ends up being an easy choice. I’m not a nutritionist so I can’t exactly say, but I think you get a lot of protein from these types of food. And if you don’t do a lot of exercise that protein will turn into fat, putting you on a fast track to being the widest vegetarian you know. Be careful.
3. B12. There’s a list of nutritional drawbacks to being a vegetarian, but I’ve never really woken up thinking, “I need me some Omega 3 fatty acids.” B12 was a different story. After spending enough time as a vegetarian, waking up involved two alarms armed with machine guns. B12 does a lot of things, but also helps to give you more energy. So if you’re feeling weak you should make sure you’re getting b12 in some manner. I typically get it from soy milk or diary stuff.
4. Do a lot of research and be willing to try new things. When it comes to food I’m pretty much a one trick pony, switching my favorite foods out probably once a year. This meant that I spent probably about two years eating Boca burgers in college. After that I could barely stand to order one in a group of friends. Thank goodness for the avocado. It is the only thing that will make me eat these well seasoned hockey pucks anymore.
5. While we’re on the subject, Soy is the strangest foodstuff you will ever encounter. If you hate it one way, it can be made into another thing. Soy milk tastes like wet cardboard but tempeh, which is a fermented form of soy, is pretty good on burritos.
6. Prepare to become the representative of your race. Have you ever been around someone who asks you for advice on your gender, like you have group meeting that determine what you find attractive? Expect this on a larger scale. The most frequent is the “picky eater” scenario, where you’re forced to choose a location even if everyone else in the group will only eat hamburgers dipped in Mayan gold.
7. If you decide to give up on being a vegetarian, be careful what kind of meat you eat. A lot of people feel compelled to eat the worst thing when they break up with vegetarianism, diving into a burger king sandwich or a steak. Depending on how long you were a vegetarian, expect to be in a lot of pain. Some people can get away with it but most people lose their meat-digesting enzymes over time. This means you will have a rough night if you decide to roll around on top of a rib eye smothered in Chicken McNuggets.

As I have repeatedly complained, it has been about four months since I stopped writing my book about a world completely covered in trash. My book, Scrap, was turning into a monster and I had a few anxiety flashes about it. I had become stuck. My friends urged me to take a break so I didn’t blow a gasket. It was a well deserved rest, but I’ve been plagued by waves of guilt about not finishing my latest draft. I felt like I was drifting closer and closer to the kind of person that mentions they are working on a book but never produces anything out of it.

This sparked my friend to suggest writing some smaller stories involving the main character of the book in ways I had not previously allowed myself to do. As the subject matter of the book involved a sort of serious subject matter I didn’t feel like I could be too fantastic with it. Every portion of the book was externally very magical but always had a very realistic core to it. This apparently had a sort of poisonous effect on my motivation.

After finishing my first mini short story using my main character and my setting, I feel a lot better. But the bit that inspired me the most to write this update was a revelation: the draft I have written so far had only a single conscious choice made by my main character. At the point I had stopped writing I was at the exact point where my main character had to make a big choice about what he wanted to do. Instead of working hard on making my character have some motivation, some kind of internal engine that would move him around the plot, I moved the whole world around him. The world I created was always moving him here and there, not him. Now it’s obvious why I halted when this choice had to be made: my main character never had to make a decision before in his life. How could I get him to do anything now?

So now, two extremely short stories later, I’ve gotten some better ideas of what to do with the character, what I need to explore in him. I will still attempt to write a few more of these short ideas because I quite enjoy them.

So you know what the heck I’m talking about, the first short story involved a floating trash island society of women whose foundation is based on their being “No Boys Allowed” signs surrounding them. The second involved a penal colony run by the only history teacher left. He teaches Scrap, my main character, that an apple computer fell on Newton’s head.

Back in high school I came up with an idea involving a boy whose imaginary world was completely exploded by the introduction of people who made him have to actually get involved with reality again. But instead of everything fading away nicely, his imaginary friend fights against his removal and starts to haunt the main character.

Long story short, a lot of people told me to watch Fight Club. I resisted doing so for a long, long time until a long night and a borrowed movie later. The movie was pretty much a 139 minute heart attack for me. After I got done I spent the next week jotting down the differences between my plot and Fight Club, ultimately trashing my idea because I felt they were too similar even though my plot involved a chase scene where you can only see the imaginary friend in the reflection of passing windows.

I don’t know if this can be traced to my high school art teacher proudly announcing that nothing is ever original, an event that’s been laser etched into my memory, but any time I get the slighest whiff that I could be told “Oh, that’s like that one movie….” my head explodes. I place such a premium on creating original concepts that I beat myself up if I see an idea of mine appear in an upcoming movie, book, or media.

Why do I bring this up? Because a great movie has come out by Pixar, Wall-E, and I’m terrified to see it. Completely worried. The setting of the movie? An Earth completely covered in garbage. The setting of my book that I started back in May 2007? An Earth covered in garbage. My brain? Melted.

Plenty of my friends have tried to appeal to the logic side of my brain about this. A premise is just a premise, it doesn’t promise the same results. Both ideas can be original at the same time. An idea doesn’t have to be 100% original in order to be worthwhile. The logic side of my brain knows all of this but the rest of my brain has shotguns and pitchforks. It’s just a strange hangup of mine that I don’t exactly know how to tackle yet.

When I do, I’ll go watch Wall-E and probably love it. And not immediately run to a notebook to chart out the differences.

I believe I’ve made a mistake with this website that I often make with my friends: pretending that everyone knows exactly what I’m doing right now. Therefore I’m going to list what I’m up to right now.

1. Working on constructing a comedy show for July 26th. More details on this to follow.
2. Building my own act for said comedy show, which includes a new story and some multimedia work.
3. Working on a sketch(es?) with Tyler and Coree Spencer.
4. Attempting to resolve my blocks that are keeping me from finishing my book, Scrap. The book is a speculative fiction piece about the earth being so covered in trash that it can bury cities. I started it a year ago when I came to Portland, plowed through two drafts, but halted near last March.
5. Considering taking a stab at making a rough draft of a script I’ve had floating in my head for the past three years called The Romantic Nixons.
6. Struggling through “The Artists’ Way”. I started out strong but I soon realized I’m having a hard time writing three pages every morning. My handwriting is so small that it takes a while to do it unless I have a very specific idea of what I want to write.
7. Feeling lazy because I’m not doing enough.

I’ve been very busy working on a lot of different things, so I’m going to pad my website with a video The Human Giant. If you haven’t caught their material, you definitely should. The writing is great, every joke is distilled down to the most powerful bits, and the graphics/cinematography are really high quality. When I was over at Tyler’s watching their DVD I noticed that they always agreed with a premise as opposed to thinking they have gone too far with it. It results in some very funny heights that I don’t think other groups would be comfortable reaching to.

This is one of their older pieces, a standard job interview premise, but taken to a great new level. There are a few others that I like more but I feel this one is a good starter on what they are capable of.

Why haven’t the presidents of Idiocracy, The Man, Head of State, the Fifth Element, Deep Impact, 24, and Rufus Jones for President endorsed Obama yet?

I was digging through my old software not too long ago and came across probably the oldest CD I still have: Fantasy Illustration. This is the kind of stuff I grew up on. The standard of art for most of it is this:

While some of the pieces actually have some interesting things going on in them:

It makes me wonder if this was an early CD of completely digitally created art or just kind of choppy amateur art. If you have a hankering to see how far we’ve progressed in 20 years, head over to ConceptArt.org to see what kind of art people are creating digitally now.

Featured right now is Andrew Jones, who has two downloadable movies regarding his work. They cost $15 and you have to pay for them through Paypal, but his art is so completely beautiful that I might just break my “No Paypal” rule for them.

My friend Renee was kind enough to tell me that these two comedians were talking about making a living on NPR yesterday. It’s a nice listen. The people that called in all brought up some really interesting points. The discussion about bitterness between comedians started at 10:10.

You can get it here.

Welcome to an entry that’s nothing but complaining about technology.

It’s been over a year since I’ve moved to Portland. Part of the process of moving here was me acquiring a laptop. Right before I flew over I got myself an Inspiron 6400/E1505. My friend Chris Fisher informed me that Dell’s are notorious for keyboard problems. I’m not sure if my laptop heard this through the grapevine on its’ way over, but it must have because fairly shortly the keyboard stopped working. The B, the N, and the spacebar had all formed a suicide pact sometime within the first month I had it. I can imagine the conversation went something like this.

The B Key: “Have you seen what he writes on us?”
The N Key: “Let’s kill ourselves.”
The Spacebar: “SPACE.”

Seeing as I was about to transition between two sides of the country, I opted to not do anything about it for a short time. Instead I bought myself a USB keyboard and worked with that. When I arrived in Portland I kept it up because I never had a lap to put my laptop on. This continued for a month until we had moved into a new apartment in Portland. Finally I grew tired of not being able to take my laptop anywhere without a usb keyboard and other devices so I called tech support. I was going to be sent a new keyboard for my laptop.

Nothing changed when I popped the new keyboard in. My desire to try again was very minimal so I let it continue to not work for another stretch of time before I called again. This time they sent a service technician to my house in order to do some repairs. While I sat on the futon in the living room he worked on the laptop in the kitchen, both of us in silence. Around halfway through the procedure I began to hear soldering. If you don’t know what this is, it’s when you use hot metal as a sort of glue to join two metals together. I figured he was fixing some kind of broken chip on my motherboard. Whatever he did seemed to work. The B, the N, and the spacebar had been brought back from the dead. Or so I thought.

Coming back from the dead must have brought some undead keyboard plague with them because within a week I noticed my number keys were acting strange. Strange as in, when I pressed “8″ it would type out “08000888999899988887″. I threw up my hands and plugged my USB keyboard back in. Later, my mother called in while she was visiting and they took her through a lot of cleaning steps for the keyboard, which I believe made her take my laptop apart, a process even to me seems like performing surgery on an alien. Somehow they were able to push her through it and the keyboard seemed to start working again.

That was until yesterday, when I got up to turn on my computer and it wouldn’t even boot. I had some random shutdowns within the past few days but I never paid it much attention. During my computer repair days a few years ago I remember Inspirions having overheating problems and just assumed I had left it on too long or was using it too much. Of course this wasn’t the issue. Thankfully I did a backup of my writing and my entire system not too long before, so I only have a few items that could possibly be lost if the entire system decided to go haywire. It’s not the battery, because both my internal and external couldn’t have blown in a single stroke without some kind of power surge. And my surge protector is completely fine. So what i’m guessing is that the B, the N, and the Spacebar have finally completed their goal of convincing my computer to kill itself.