Just a cute little graphic I whipped up to promote this event online. Hopefully an animated GIF will follow soon.

UPDATE: As promised (kinda) here is the awesome animated GIF of the poster. I wonder if this is how Terry Gilliam got started.

Click image for hi-res version. Trust me, you want to see this in hi-res.

I love Liberace. Ever since reading Dave Hickey’s essay, “A Rhinestone as Big as The Ritz”  in “Air Guitar.” A fascinating man.

This j-card was from a tape I bought at a thrift store. It includes Liberace’s wonderful rendition of chopsticks as well as some great between Liberace and his audience. Well the tape deck in the Buick finally went kaput so there will be no more Liberace sadly. The next car I buy probably won’t even have a tape deck. So, I figured I’d immortalize this small piece of Liberace on the web.

More pictures, and video, available at my Flickr page

Every year for the past 32 years, the weekend before the Super Bowl is Concertina Bowl (CB). A couple hundred people pack the Blainbrook Bowl Even Center for 12 hours of non-stop concertina music, KOC bratwurst, and lots and lots of dancing. I went for the first time last year on a bit of a lark, but found the even so damn interesting I went back again this year.

I grew up near the city of Blaine, where CB is held. 20 years ago it was the edge of the suburbs, full of sod fields and pumpkin farms. All that land has now been turned into housing developments and KFCs, and the edge of the suburbs is now more like East Bethel, or Ham Lake (what we used to consider the ‘country’). But the Blainbrook Bowl has always been there. Even with the expansion and widening of Highway 65, which now lumbers just beyond the parking lot behind a wall of concrete, Blainbrook has endured. It’s not fancy. It never was. It was just where you went to hang out at night. After the place closed for the night the mass exodus headed just a mile north on 65 to Perkins. High schoolers and bar closers alike would sit for hours drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and eating Country Club Melts.

I’m sure this nostalgia plays a large part of why I’m so enamored with CB. But the strangeness of it all is what really attracts me. It’s fo alien, so foreign to me. I attend Concertina Bowl without irony or condescension. I am just truly fascinated with it. I’m not a fan of concertina music, although I secretly enjoy the fact that I can’t tell one song from another. I can usually discern the waltzes from the polkas but after that I’m lost. I guess I just really enjoy seeing people who have enough passion to carve out an event for what they love, even if I don’t understand it. I guess it all boils down to what the great Reine Motschke said about his love for the concertina:

“If I have to explain it to you,
you ain’t never gonna get it!”

Here’s a piece of paper my friend Daniel used to take orders during the Muddy Pig’s second annual Belgian Beer Fest. Notice how he began using different colored pens and wrote in different directions to discern which orders belonged together. Emergence. Fascinating.

Click image for hi res.

Recorded on November 18, 2009

The L Train, from 1st Ave to Lorimer St

Big Table Studio is now on the board, or at least on the wall. I just slapped up our ’signage’ last night. Every studio in the Jax Building has the opportunity to have their name on the wall in the entryway, kind of like a directory. So Craig asked me if I had any extra time if I wouldn’t mind coming up with something. So I found a roll of masking tape and went to work.

Big  Table is comprised of 5 other designers, illustrators, a screen printer, and myself. We’ve had the space in the Jax Building in lowertown St Paul for about two months now, but have finally finished the painting and have moved in. I’m hoping to spend some quality time here working on a number of projects I’ve got on my mind for 2010. And there’s a liquor store right across the street, bonus.

I thought this was pretty funny for some reason.

Where else on the net are you going to find hi res scans of awesome Asian soup packaging?

Oh yeah! We ballin’!

Click for Hi Res