It's tough to admit one's failures as a man, so tough it might almost be manly to do so. Almost.There is always an excuse not to be a man, to not take charge of one's own life and to support others in same: too many bills to pay, not enough time, not enough energy, not enough motivation. But not a single one of these holds water to someone determined to transcend them.As my high school track coach Tracy S. once said, " GYST!". Translation: get your shit together.Just now I ... [read more]

Note: "Power Hour" #5 set to private access. Tags:

Why I'm Leaving BoulderI'm leaving Boulder. Let me tell you why.First, there's the lack of ghosts. Not enough history haunts the backstreets and exposed rooftops of this burg. It's too new, too developed, too TOO. At the same time, there's absolutely nothing new about it. The mountains provide an ancient foil to the absolute newness of mini-malls and downtown office buildings. (New Urbanism does not equal awesome.) There is nothing in between, no mid-range. It's all bass ... [read more]

We're on a main bike route. Well, several. The bike routes cross in the street out front. It's a Scottish nightmare: white plaids on black background, so many stripes and lines and subtle cues you'd want to hang yourself with a long piece of haggis (sheep gut). For one, the cyclists are always smashing into each other. The police have broken up one row after the other, and this is only Wednesday. There are plenty of police. My brother says we have descended into a police state, but I disagree... [read more]

Congrats to Gwen on the launch of her travel site Expatriette this week. The site is dedicated to hip, edgy, female travellers, and (ahem) has a really sweet logo*. Boys aren't banned (not yet at least, muhahaha), so fellas, feel free to click away as well. And, in true Gwen Bell form, she's come out swinging: check out her hilarious post "Beyond Backpacking". (Warning: not safe for Leonardo Dicaprio fans.) CONGRATS GWEN!!! *Designed by who else? Us! Tags: travel, design

To mark this year's Independence Day, I decided to forgo the hot dogs and fireworks and do what I do best: launch a blog. Please check out Foreignerd, the latest project by the Plunge Artist team. And Happy Birthday America! Tags: travel, blogging

Well, it was my last hurrah at Integral Institute, and it's finally out on book stands now. Meet The Integral Vision, a graphics-dense introduction to the controversial scholar's "theory of everything". Special thanks to the Zoosphere crew for co-directing the illustrations with me and doing the production work, and Feliciano Type Foundry for the amazing fonts. From Publisher's Weekly: "In a scant 200+ pages chock full of handsome illustrations and spare, Zen-like diagrams and tables, he forge... [read more]

This weekend I participated in Startup Weekend in Boulder, a crazy-ass social experiment wherein 72 people threw together a functioning internet start-up in a single weekend. The results: VoSnap, a web-based "quick vote" service which allows you to send your friends a polling question (i.e. "Where should we eat tonight?") to which they can reply via SMS text-messaging or email. Art Direction by me. =) Now Digg it! (More soon...) Tags: startups, boulder, design

The café should not have existed. Too many horrible things had occurred to insure its placement on the sterilized upper evil crust of the social sphere it rested upon. Case in point: the skeleton. No one knew about the skeleton, but nevertheless there it lay, hundreds of feet below the eastern parking garage, the same garage where the spotlessly-heeled parked their spotless cars and ate customized foodstuffs from spotless plates at the Spotlesse Bistro on 9th Street. The café was on 10th street... [read more]

The latest Paris Hilton hysteria has got me thinking: are we being robbed? With the media so focused on the blonde-tressed heiress's inane flounderings through the Los Angeles penal system, aren't there a whole lot more important topics -- ahem, Net Neutrality -- we should be focusing on? With everyone's attention made increasingly scarce by increased workloads, the proliferation of TV channels, and the latest web 2.0 app-of-the-minute, who's NOT getting attention? What about the old, the sick, ... [read more]

Michael Goldhaber has posted a thought-provoking response to my previous piece on the attention economy. Some of his solutions to the unfairness of having the world's eyeballs affixed to Paris Hilton-style media spectacles include: 1) Paying more attention to our own circles of friends and relations rather than more distant kinds of stars. 2) Offering more and better modes of attention getting to allow each person to find the best mode for getting attention for what is most truly and importan... [read more]

I thought Philly's was bad. I thought DC's bad. I thought wrong. Buffalo, New York, my unofficial second home, has the worst airport I've encountered on my slow-paced Foreignerd world tour thus far. It's not that the runway is mismanaged (Philly takes that prize). It's not that the concourse sprawls on boring and forever (umm... DC). It's just that, if you're on foot, if you don't have the foresight to rent a cab, hire a shuttle bus, or lease out a rental car, you're fucked. I tried to cross t... [read more]

I've got a sadness that only CGI can cure. Tags:

Robbie didn't think the Last Days would be so anticlimactic, but they were. He was a lowly tank, an M-1 Abrams, piloted by another thinkcan like himself. Herman was a newer thinkcan, but crude in his functioning: they'd designed him to drive an M-1 Abrams in a straight line, running over Crisstings and Lionmen alike, swiveling his turret in lazy arcs across the sky as the spiderplanes flew overhead.The spiderplanes were the ones who did the actual fighting: up there past the stormclouds,... [read more]

I lived in the old empire, in the days when the Great Crumbling had begun. There was a bridge, somewhere up on the northern waters of the Mississippi, which collapsed during rush hour and sent dozens of cars into the drink, trapping and destroying many more. There was the New Orleans flood a few years before that, where the great levees gave way. And of course, the massive towers which collapsed at the behest of a few errant 747s. The very infrastructure was rotting like quicksand beneath our f... [read more]

A friend has recently introduced me to Sark, a large-livin' artist lady with lots to offer we creatives. Her work reminds me of a cross between a tidier Ralph Steadman and writing coach/painter Natalie Goldberg, but it's her concepts of "micromovements" which caught my eye. Basically, take any super-amazing creative goal you want to accomplish for yourself, and dice it up into tasks which each take no more than 5 minutes to do. Set a loose deadline for each, and feel a sense of accomplishment a... [read more]

Call it sacrilege against my own kind, but when I think about Germany, I don't immediately get hipster-indie chills when picturing the "new Williasmburg" of Berlin. No, my interests are more captured by Frankfurt, birthplace of banking. Why? Because it so verboten to an artist like me. If I can make the obscure abstractions of the accrual and dispensation of finances somehow aesthetically compelling, then perhaps the "starving artist" ethos can be something forever buried... [read more]

George Eastman, founder of Kodak, was a genius (via Wiki): The letter "K" had been a favorite of Eastman's, he is quoted as saying, "it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter". He and his mother devised the name Kodak with an anagram set. He said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name : it must be short, you can not mispronounce it, and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak. Amen! Tags:

Sensory Extensions The electric lights exist to reveal what our naked eyes cannot. The stereo systems echo and repeat sounds which our ears were not present to hear. A soufflé of international gourmandry awaits my tongue in the kitchen, while my video game system gives me the thrill of wars I'll never participate in. And the car: The car is my two feet multiplied by the tens of thousands. To hear the whir-increase of an accelerator in the distance is to hear an actual human foot, wrapped in it... [read more]

It's been a while since I've blogged on Zaadz. Most of the action is now occurring at Foreignerd.com, my "speculative travel writing" blog. Right now I'm in Berlin, so all of the posts have taken on a decidedly Prussian overtone, much like that lion chugging a beer posing in front of the Fernsehturm (TV tower) you see above. Also note, I've set up a new Flickr set to capture my Berliner fotografs. All of which is to say, for the latest P'SAL news, better to check the aforementioned sites, rath... [read more]

The latest Paris Hilton hysteria has got me thinking: are we being robbed? With the media so focused on the blonde-tressed heiress's inane flounderings through the Los Angeles penal system, aren't there a whole lot more important topics -- ahem, Net Neutrality -- we should be focusing on? With everyone's attention made increasingly scarce by increased workloads, the proliferation of TV channels, and the latest web 2.0 app-of-the-minute, who's NOT getting attention? What about the old, the sick, ... [read more]

The café should not have existed. Too many horrible things had occurred to insure its placement on the sterilized upper evil crust of the social sphere it rested upon. Case in point: the skeleton. No one knew about the skeleton, but nevertheless there it lay, hundreds of feet below the eastern parking garage, the same garage where the spotlessly-heeled parked their spotless cars and ate customized foodstuffs from spotless plates at the Spotlesse Bistro on 9th Street. The café was on 10th street... [read more]

This weekend I participated in Startup Weekend in Boulder, a crazy-ass social experiment wherein 72 people threw together a functioning internet start-up in a single weekend. The results: VoSnap, a web-based "quick vote" service which allows you to send your friends a polling question (i.e. "Where should we eat tonight?") to which they can reply via SMS text-messaging or email. Art Direction by me. =) Now Digg it! (More soon...)

Well, it was my last hurrah at Integral Institute, and it's finally out on book stands now. Meet The Integral Vision, a graphics-dense introduction to the controversial scholar's "theory of everything". Special thanks to the Zoosphere crew for co-directing the illustrations with me and doing the production work, and Feliciano Type Foundry for the amazing fonts. From Publisher's Weekly: "In a scant 200+ pages chock full of handsome illustrations and spare, Zen-like diagrams and tables, he forge... [read more]

To mark this year's Independence Day, I decided to forgo the hot dogs and fireworks and do what I do best: launch a blog. Please check out Foreignerd, the latest project by the Plunge Artist team. And Happy Birthday America!