Tue - October 19, 2010
The game of life
I have this friend, she's done with school and
not sure what to do next. She's got a lot of interests, but not a single
obvious opportunity. She's more creative and has more raw talent than I do.
Her words crackle with sass and wit much in the way mine
don't.
She's stuck though, without an obvious path, she's both afraid to choose one and also doesn't know where to start. All doors are equally unknown.
She said to me:
"I feel like I'm playing the claw game and I only have one quarter."
This is descriptive and evocative. I would have expressed it as: "I have option paralysis - the tendency when given multiple choices to make none." Like I said, she's a better writer than me.
What I am though, is older and what I have learned is that the game of life is not played the way she thinks. You DO get one quarter but in the claw game of life, you use the claw as many times as you can until your quarter runs out. The downside is, you have already deposited your quarter. You are already playing as your claw dangles in wait. Do you hear me dear friend of mine? While you are debating and waiting the clock is running. Get that claw moving, grab for things, see what happens.
On the upside, if you can read this, your quarter has not run out yet.
On a side note, courtesy of apple, this blog as you know it is going bye bye. I will continue it at www.maxwax11.com in some form.
She's stuck though, without an obvious path, she's both afraid to choose one and also doesn't know where to start. All doors are equally unknown.
She said to me:
"I feel like I'm playing the claw game and I only have one quarter."
This is descriptive and evocative. I would have expressed it as: "I have option paralysis - the tendency when given multiple choices to make none." Like I said, she's a better writer than me.
What I am though, is older and what I have learned is that the game of life is not played the way she thinks. You DO get one quarter but in the claw game of life, you use the claw as many times as you can until your quarter runs out. The downside is, you have already deposited your quarter. You are already playing as your claw dangles in wait. Do you hear me dear friend of mine? While you are debating and waiting the clock is running. Get that claw moving, grab for things, see what happens.
On the upside, if you can read this, your quarter has not run out yet.
On a side note, courtesy of apple, this blog as you know it is going bye bye. I will continue it at www.maxwax11.com in some form.
Posted at 10:49 PM
Wed - September 22, 2010
The best camera is the one you have with you.
My wife shot this with her iphone while we were on
a walk. She was probably walking when she did
it.
I'm always on the lookout for textures which I layer onto 3d models or whatnot. While picking up doors at Lowes, i looked down and saw this on our cart. I shot it with my iphone.
I own a lot of really nice lenses from Canon, Nikon and Leica, but they're all just paperweights if they're not with me when I see something worth shooting.
Three things I wish I knew when I started shooting:
1. It's the shooter not the gear that makes the picture.
2. Shoot with your eyes, there is beauty anywhere and everywhere. To that effect, try to have a camera with you at all times.
3. Anyone who insists on a particular brand of camera over all others is overly invested in their gear and has not learned lesson 1.
Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately, there have been some changes in my life that have made blogging not part of my regular routine. A pretty big change in my lifestyle, my good friends know what I'm talking about - the iphone 4.
No seriously, I never open my laptop anymore, everything I used to do on my laptop is on my iphone. Except this ancient software I still use to blog, which is why I keep forgetting to blog.
Summer vacation is over, we now resume our regularly scheduled blogging.
I'm always on the lookout for textures which I layer onto 3d models or whatnot. While picking up doors at Lowes, i looked down and saw this on our cart. I shot it with my iphone.
I own a lot of really nice lenses from Canon, Nikon and Leica, but they're all just paperweights if they're not with me when I see something worth shooting.
Three things I wish I knew when I started shooting:
1. It's the shooter not the gear that makes the picture.
2. Shoot with your eyes, there is beauty anywhere and everywhere. To that effect, try to have a camera with you at all times.
3. Anyone who insists on a particular brand of camera over all others is overly invested in their gear and has not learned lesson 1.
Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately, there have been some changes in my life that have made blogging not part of my regular routine. A pretty big change in my lifestyle, my good friends know what I'm talking about - the iphone 4.
No seriously, I never open my laptop anymore, everything I used to do on my laptop is on my iphone. Except this ancient software I still use to blog, which is why I keep forgetting to blog.
Summer vacation is over, we now resume our regularly scheduled blogging.
Posted at 10:19 PM
Fri - July 23, 2010
Know what you don't know.
I heard a speaker tell a story of how he arrived to
his speaking gig early and was shown to the auditorium. There was a grand piano
on wheels in the center of the stage. The man from the auditorium said, "I'll
go get some guys and we'll move the piano for you." Left by himself, the
speaker decides to move the piano. He gives the piano a push and watches in
horror as one leg buckles and the whole thing tilts and comes crashing down. It
turns out the piano had one broken leg, which the speaker had no idea about.
One of the downsides of incompetence is that you don't know you are incompetent.
I grew up wanting everyone to think I had the answers. I would frequently answer questions with "facts" that sounded right to me. Sometimes bluffing worked, but eventually people catch on. It took a lot of growing up before I was able to say "I don't know." Now, when I have an opinion, I will state it as an opinion: "I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure if you can see the bone you want to go to the hospital." My friend Reid has a saying: "Having an internet connection and google does not make you a doctor." The most emphatic thing I will say is: "I could be wrong, but I'm 97% sure that your brakes are not supposed to make that grinding noise." I'm never 100% sure; I've felt 100% sure and been 100% wrong. Sometimes things have changed since the last time you were there. It turns out some kinds of root beer do have caffeine in them.
I'm a pretty smart guy. But I'm not a mechanic or a doctor or even a plumber. I approach everything assuming it can be understood, but I don't start off assuming I understand. I'm not saying you shouldn't leap into brand new things; in fact, I've made a career of it - sometimes having a lack of knowledge brings a fresh perspective. But some days, the smartest thing I'll say all day is "I don't know."
UPDATE:
I was doing some internet research and it amazes me how many people ask important questions of total strangers who have limited qualifications. After a spirited yahoo answers debate about whether or not to worry if your child's penis turns blue, someone chimed in with the best answer of the night:
"I'm a 16 year old girl, I've never seen an infant penis, maybe you should consult a doctor"
I guess you have to be 16 to realize you are not a doctor. Just because someone asks you a question doesn't mean you should try to answer it.
Now, the flipside to knowing what you don't know is that most of the time, no one cares as much as you do. Your mechanic, doctor, plumber and graphic designer are all doing a job. At the end of the day they don't have to live with your car, tumor, toilet or album cover. They go home. You go home with your tumor. So if your instincts are telling you that the person you are dealing with doesn't care or isn't listening to you, then get a second or third opinion. Trust your instincts.
OK I'm done now.
TLDR: Know what you don't know, but also know when to get a second qualified opinion.
*I wish I could remember who the speaker was so I could credit his story.
One of the downsides of incompetence is that you don't know you are incompetent.
I grew up wanting everyone to think I had the answers. I would frequently answer questions with "facts" that sounded right to me. Sometimes bluffing worked, but eventually people catch on. It took a lot of growing up before I was able to say "I don't know." Now, when I have an opinion, I will state it as an opinion: "I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure if you can see the bone you want to go to the hospital." My friend Reid has a saying: "Having an internet connection and google does not make you a doctor." The most emphatic thing I will say is: "I could be wrong, but I'm 97% sure that your brakes are not supposed to make that grinding noise." I'm never 100% sure; I've felt 100% sure and been 100% wrong. Sometimes things have changed since the last time you were there. It turns out some kinds of root beer do have caffeine in them.
I'm a pretty smart guy. But I'm not a mechanic or a doctor or even a plumber. I approach everything assuming it can be understood, but I don't start off assuming I understand. I'm not saying you shouldn't leap into brand new things; in fact, I've made a career of it - sometimes having a lack of knowledge brings a fresh perspective. But some days, the smartest thing I'll say all day is "I don't know."
UPDATE:
I was doing some internet research and it amazes me how many people ask important questions of total strangers who have limited qualifications. After a spirited yahoo answers debate about whether or not to worry if your child's penis turns blue, someone chimed in with the best answer of the night:
"I'm a 16 year old girl, I've never seen an infant penis, maybe you should consult a doctor"
I guess you have to be 16 to realize you are not a doctor. Just because someone asks you a question doesn't mean you should try to answer it.
Now, the flipside to knowing what you don't know is that most of the time, no one cares as much as you do. Your mechanic, doctor, plumber and graphic designer are all doing a job. At the end of the day they don't have to live with your car, tumor, toilet or album cover. They go home. You go home with your tumor. So if your instincts are telling you that the person you are dealing with doesn't care or isn't listening to you, then get a second or third opinion. Trust your instincts.
OK I'm done now.
TLDR: Know what you don't know, but also know when to get a second qualified opinion.
*I wish I could remember who the speaker was so I could credit his story.
Posted at 06:23 PM
Fri - June 25, 2010
on living in gratitude.
Why is it so hard for us to be grateful for what we
have? I have air conditioning, it's 96 degrees outside. Do I thank the air
conditioner every day?: "Thank you air conditioner for making my life so cool."
Instead I just take it for granted that the air conditioner is doing the job it
was born to do. On a trip to the pharmacy I asked the wage slave behind the
counter how he was doing. His reply turned my grumpy frown upside
down:
"Just another day in air conditioned paradise"
He waved his hand to indicate his gratitude to not be one of the 4 guys outside who were trimming the bushes in the hot summer heat. I was shamed at my grumpiness. I almost hired him on the spot except i don't own a pharmacy. But someday if I ever start a conglomerate I want to hire that man.
We can always find things to be sad about and we can always find things to be happy about. I think that's why helping with the homeless is so good for perspective; you really come home grateful for things like air conditioning... and well.. having a home to come home to.
"Just another day in air conditioned paradise"
He waved his hand to indicate his gratitude to not be one of the 4 guys outside who were trimming the bushes in the hot summer heat. I was shamed at my grumpiness. I almost hired him on the spot except i don't own a pharmacy. But someday if I ever start a conglomerate I want to hire that man.
We can always find things to be sad about and we can always find things to be happy about. I think that's why helping with the homeless is so good for perspective; you really come home grateful for things like air conditioning... and well.. having a home to come home to.
Posted at 01:05 PM
Mon - June 7, 2010
a morning prayer
instead of asking for a
blessing
may I see the things I am already blessed with.
then, I will always lead a blessed life.
rather than not knowing my blessings till they are taken away.
instead of asking for something, anything to give me hope
may I learn faith, which is unswayed by shadows and storms
thus will I learn to hope in the darkest of times
and rather than asking for others to lean on
others will lean on me
I ask not for riches or treasures but for clarity of vision
for then I will always be able to see truly how rich and how treasured I am
plus I'm practically blind, have you seen my glasses? they're like coke bottles.
may I see the things I am already blessed with.
then, I will always lead a blessed life.
rather than not knowing my blessings till they are taken away.
instead of asking for something, anything to give me hope
may I learn faith, which is unswayed by shadows and storms
thus will I learn to hope in the darkest of times
and rather than asking for others to lean on
others will lean on me
I ask not for riches or treasures but for clarity of vision
for then I will always be able to see truly how rich and how treasured I am
plus I'm practically blind, have you seen my glasses? they're like coke bottles.
Posted at 12:21 PM
Fri - June 4, 2010
fortune cookie wisdom
the soul of punk is not in mohawks and tattoos, but
in not needing to impress people.
Posted at 12:43 PM
Thu - May 13, 2010
On the hidden joys of songwriting
Writing is a lonely thing. At least for me it is,
I sit in my same old room and I try to coax something out of nothing. I try to
make the instruments sing new songs or make new sounds but my fingers fall into
the same worn grooves of the same chords every time. It feels silly sometimes
pretending to be a songwriter. I wonder if the songs mean anything to anyone
else but me. Sometimes I start to believe my critics and I think it's time to
quit trying.
And then I discovered youtube.
Well, actually I discovered all the people on youtube who took the songs we wrote and did something with them. Thousands and thousands of videos. I tried to watch them all and gave up after an entire day. There are people singing superchick songs, playing superchick songs, teaching other people to play superchick songs, remixing superchick songs, making music videos to superchick songs, riding horses to superchick songs, animating lego to superchick songs and dressing up like zombies and choreographing a dance routine to superchick songs. In fact there's one insanely awesome girl named Melissa Pemberton who stunt flies airplanes to superchick songs. There's an 8 year old girl playing drums along with Rock What You Got. There's a female wrestler who makes her entrance to a superchick song. I even found people covering songs i wrote before superchick.
It's all a little mind boggling.
You sit in your studio/dungeon like howard hughes during the recluse years, you sift through the same old soil every day hoping something new takes root and you never think it's going to mean anything to anyone and then one day you discover people singing these songs and making them their own. I remember teaching myself to play axel F on the piano as my liberation from classical music and never in my wildest dreams did I imagine someone would teach themselves to play a song that came out of my fingers. And then write it out onto sheet music and give it to other people so they could play it. It's really humbling. It gives me hope.
I fail to meet my own standards, I fail to meet the critics expectations, but it's a huge blessing to have written songs that someone in an itunes review would say:
this album was the soundtrack to my summer.
thank you so much to anyone who ever listened.
And then I discovered youtube.
Well, actually I discovered all the people on youtube who took the songs we wrote and did something with them. Thousands and thousands of videos. I tried to watch them all and gave up after an entire day. There are people singing superchick songs, playing superchick songs, teaching other people to play superchick songs, remixing superchick songs, making music videos to superchick songs, riding horses to superchick songs, animating lego to superchick songs and dressing up like zombies and choreographing a dance routine to superchick songs. In fact there's one insanely awesome girl named Melissa Pemberton who stunt flies airplanes to superchick songs. There's an 8 year old girl playing drums along with Rock What You Got. There's a female wrestler who makes her entrance to a superchick song. I even found people covering songs i wrote before superchick.
It's all a little mind boggling.
You sit in your studio/dungeon like howard hughes during the recluse years, you sift through the same old soil every day hoping something new takes root and you never think it's going to mean anything to anyone and then one day you discover people singing these songs and making them their own. I remember teaching myself to play axel F on the piano as my liberation from classical music and never in my wildest dreams did I imagine someone would teach themselves to play a song that came out of my fingers. And then write it out onto sheet music and give it to other people so they could play it. It's really humbling. It gives me hope.
I fail to meet my own standards, I fail to meet the critics expectations, but it's a huge blessing to have written songs that someone in an itunes review would say:
this album was the soundtrack to my summer.
thank you so much to anyone who ever listened.
Posted at 01:46 PM
Fri - April 30, 2010
WWIDIIHAY2L
Imagine this. You have been to the doctor and
you have been given a year to live. This is a good way to understand what
is important to you. I'm going to make a bracelet: WWIDIIHAY2L. What Would
I Do If I Had A Year To Live? If you ask yourself this guiding question
regularly, you'll get right to the heart of life. You won't be looking
back, wishing you could have the last 10 years "like gold in your hands."
Obviously, we cannot live every year like it's our last year - that would be
similar to being in one of those booths where they blow money around and you
have one minute to grab all the twenties you can out of the air. This is
not about that year. This is about the 10 years that come before that
year. The 10 years you might be living
now.
With that in mind, here's what I've learned so far. Your mileage may vary.
1. We do not have time to just exist. If we don't try, don't risk, don't fall, don't learn and don't strive, we're probably not living. When I go rock climbing, if I don't fall off at some point during the day, then I wasn't pushing myself and I didn't get any better. Falling is not failing. Not falling is failing.
2. If you're going to leap off a cliff, make sure you understand what you are leaping into. Know how much coffee you will have to sell to stay open before you open. Research, talk to people who have been where you want to be. Test, prototype, repeat. Move fast and loose. Sometimes to get to where you want to be, you have to make that leap just make sure there isn't a rope bridge somewhere that you could take instead.
3. We do not have time to be stuck or lost. If you look 5 years forward and your job is still making you unhappy or your boyfriend is still not going to ask you to marry him or Comcast is going to keep overcharging you for its crappy service, it's time to either make the changes yourself or move on. If your plan for the future is hoping anything besides you will change, then it's time to make a new plan.
4. We do not have time to hold onto grudges, anger or past hurts. Say what you have to say. Get it off your chest. People are the only true joy on this planet and we stand to lose that when we wall them out. If the people who hurt you aren't worth knowing, then move on and invest in people who are... but either way, let the hurt be in the past. Don't bring that stuff from the people you hate to the people you love. If they are family, they might be the same people, but try anyways. We do not have time to want people to be how we want them to be; they are who they are. Learn to love imperfect people. You will feel better about yourself when you do.
5. Impressing people or worrying what they think about us is a waste of time. I once saw some guys on TV picking up girls on the beach by telling them they were in Bon Jovi. The girls were duly impressed, but it was all a lie. Why do we pretend to be more than what we are? We might as well tell people we are in Bon Jovi (on a side note, is it just me or has Jon Bon Jovi not aged in the last 30 years?) Chances are you don't even like the people you are trying to impress. Why kiss the feet of the people who kick you?
6. Try not to beat yourself up about the past. What has happened has happened. We cannot change that, but we can change what will come. Learn from your past, grieve your losses, but move on and focus your energy on your future.
7. We do not have time to put things off till tomorrow. We only have today. Whether it is fear or apathy that keeps us from doing what we have to do, do not serve it tea while it lulls us into thinking there is always tomorrow. We do not have time to be paralyzed. If we need to go into counseling, have that suspicious lump checked out, start exercising, stop smoking, chase our dream... whatever it is, the sooner we start it, the better it will be.
8. We do not have time to live by someone else's credo or rules. Unless the phrase "it puts the lotion on or it gets the hose" applies to the person forbidding you from doing something, you alone are going to make that decision. Make your own decision. Live with the consequences. Learn. This only applies if you are 18 and older. If you live with your parents, try to understand that these people have wiped the poop off your butt thousands of times, and the only thing that makes people do that is love.
9. We do not have time to be arrogant, to think we have it all figured out. When we think we are smarter than someone, we lose the chance to learn from them. Every person, from the homeless man to my harshest critic, has something to teach me. If we go into life expecting to learn, we will. We will never know it all. Only Google knows all.
10. We don't have time to whine about life being fair. Life is not fair and there are plenty of people who have been given more than we have. There are also a lot of people who were given a lot less. It doesn't matter what we start with - it's what we do with it. If we focus on what we don't have or on what other people have, we're not using that energy to rock what we do have.
11. Don't give up, stop trying or stop believing. One day the door will close, the pencils will be put down and the final exam will be over. Until that day, it is not time to quit. If a doctor is not asking you about organ donation, you should still be fighting. Even when they bring the priest in, kick him in the nuts. Fight all the way down. If you have stopped fighting and trying, it's a kind of suicide, a loss of perspective, sometimes a chemical loss. If you can't fight, get help. Tell someone who cares about you. Let them help you fight.
12. Find out who you are. Ask yourself why you do things. When you get upset, try to figure out why. We should know our rules and our beliefs and why we made them. Chances are we are acting out a script our family wrote for us. Examine that script and rewrite the parts you think should be different.
I'm still learning, still picking my way through the garbage dump of life to find the treasures in it. I might look back later and think this list is ridiculous. But for now, it makes sense to me.
I only post this stuff, because I want us all to rock. Unless you're into jazz or something, in which case, I want you to jazz. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
peace
max
for extra credit watch Joe Versus the Volcano to find a quote from that movie in here.
With that in mind, here's what I've learned so far. Your mileage may vary.
1. We do not have time to just exist. If we don't try, don't risk, don't fall, don't learn and don't strive, we're probably not living. When I go rock climbing, if I don't fall off at some point during the day, then I wasn't pushing myself and I didn't get any better. Falling is not failing. Not falling is failing.
2. If you're going to leap off a cliff, make sure you understand what you are leaping into. Know how much coffee you will have to sell to stay open before you open. Research, talk to people who have been where you want to be. Test, prototype, repeat. Move fast and loose. Sometimes to get to where you want to be, you have to make that leap just make sure there isn't a rope bridge somewhere that you could take instead.
3. We do not have time to be stuck or lost. If you look 5 years forward and your job is still making you unhappy or your boyfriend is still not going to ask you to marry him or Comcast is going to keep overcharging you for its crappy service, it's time to either make the changes yourself or move on. If your plan for the future is hoping anything besides you will change, then it's time to make a new plan.
4. We do not have time to hold onto grudges, anger or past hurts. Say what you have to say. Get it off your chest. People are the only true joy on this planet and we stand to lose that when we wall them out. If the people who hurt you aren't worth knowing, then move on and invest in people who are... but either way, let the hurt be in the past. Don't bring that stuff from the people you hate to the people you love. If they are family, they might be the same people, but try anyways. We do not have time to want people to be how we want them to be; they are who they are. Learn to love imperfect people. You will feel better about yourself when you do.
5. Impressing people or worrying what they think about us is a waste of time. I once saw some guys on TV picking up girls on the beach by telling them they were in Bon Jovi. The girls were duly impressed, but it was all a lie. Why do we pretend to be more than what we are? We might as well tell people we are in Bon Jovi (on a side note, is it just me or has Jon Bon Jovi not aged in the last 30 years?) Chances are you don't even like the people you are trying to impress. Why kiss the feet of the people who kick you?
6. Try not to beat yourself up about the past. What has happened has happened. We cannot change that, but we can change what will come. Learn from your past, grieve your losses, but move on and focus your energy on your future.
7. We do not have time to put things off till tomorrow. We only have today. Whether it is fear or apathy that keeps us from doing what we have to do, do not serve it tea while it lulls us into thinking there is always tomorrow. We do not have time to be paralyzed. If we need to go into counseling, have that suspicious lump checked out, start exercising, stop smoking, chase our dream... whatever it is, the sooner we start it, the better it will be.
8. We do not have time to live by someone else's credo or rules. Unless the phrase "it puts the lotion on or it gets the hose" applies to the person forbidding you from doing something, you alone are going to make that decision. Make your own decision. Live with the consequences. Learn. This only applies if you are 18 and older. If you live with your parents, try to understand that these people have wiped the poop off your butt thousands of times, and the only thing that makes people do that is love.
9. We do not have time to be arrogant, to think we have it all figured out. When we think we are smarter than someone, we lose the chance to learn from them. Every person, from the homeless man to my harshest critic, has something to teach me. If we go into life expecting to learn, we will. We will never know it all. Only Google knows all.
10. We don't have time to whine about life being fair. Life is not fair and there are plenty of people who have been given more than we have. There are also a lot of people who were given a lot less. It doesn't matter what we start with - it's what we do with it. If we focus on what we don't have or on what other people have, we're not using that energy to rock what we do have.
11. Don't give up, stop trying or stop believing. One day the door will close, the pencils will be put down and the final exam will be over. Until that day, it is not time to quit. If a doctor is not asking you about organ donation, you should still be fighting. Even when they bring the priest in, kick him in the nuts. Fight all the way down. If you have stopped fighting and trying, it's a kind of suicide, a loss of perspective, sometimes a chemical loss. If you can't fight, get help. Tell someone who cares about you. Let them help you fight.
12. Find out who you are. Ask yourself why you do things. When you get upset, try to figure out why. We should know our rules and our beliefs and why we made them. Chances are we are acting out a script our family wrote for us. Examine that script and rewrite the parts you think should be different.
I'm still learning, still picking my way through the garbage dump of life to find the treasures in it. I might look back later and think this list is ridiculous. But for now, it makes sense to me.
I only post this stuff, because I want us all to rock. Unless you're into jazz or something, in which case, I want you to jazz. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
peace
max
for extra credit watch Joe Versus the Volcano to find a quote from that movie in here.
Posted at 12:28 PM
Tue - April 20, 2010
Reinvention out today
Reinvention is out today, debuting at number 134 on itunes.... thanks to everyone for sharing the love.
Posted at 04:16 PM
Mon - April 12, 2010
On the importance of belief
Hope and belief are what keep us moving forward.
Without, we simply exist; we fill our lives with diversions or numb
ourselves to the door marked life. We wonder why we don't feel much. Our
ability to work, to fight depends on what we believe, the man who digs for
buried treasure digs twice as fast as the man who believes he is digging his own
grave. To succeed, you must fight, to fight you must
believe.
Hope is a feeling, and faith is the discipline of hope when that feeling is gone. In a crowded subway, if hope and belief leave a seat, a passenger named fear will ride in that space. Fear and doubt fill the car with smoke if we do nothing.
Hope and belief fuel miracles. When we sit down to write, step out on stage, climb the mountain, venture into the darkness to slay the dragon, it is not common sense but hope and faith that propel us. Fear would keep us hidden in the tall grass, silent as mice.
Fear and doubt twist us into a mobius strip of anxiety. We go around ad infinitum, surfing for internet cats rather than spend that 5 minutes we promised ourselves we would work on our novel or work out. It is fear that tells us we are better off not to try - but it's belief that makes us need to try. Fear and doubt are the unseen puppet masters. If we do not fight their power we are their zombies. They trick us into believing that they are not with us, that we do not carry this dark trickster. When we confront them, they are mafia hoods, shaking a warning finger at us as we reach to open the door. I fear they will break my legs with a baseball bat, but fear is my own self, writ large in the smoke and shadows. Our greatest battle is a spiritual battle. I watch my friends losing this war: screenplays going unwritten, companies going unstarted, ideas dying on the vine like overripe rotting tomatoes. Bitterness is the post traumatic stress disorder of the creative generation.
How dare we try? Surely we are not brave enough or talented enough for our own standards.
The truth is, it's not us that achieves the dream; it is only us who takes the step... and indeed sometimes fear is right and we strike out. We are struck down. Sometimes the whole world watches and laughs and points. Sometimes our friends snicker behind our backs. And sometimes it is the worst of all, and our efforts are not even mocked - we are a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. We did not even make a sound as we fell.
But what fear would have us forget is that some times when we try, when we take up the pen to do battle with the tyranny of the blank slate, we are blessed with a gift and words that we did not know inside us flow onto the page. Sometimes, miracles happen. Belief knows that one step today is one step closer to the top of the 1000 step mountain. If you can't believe in the top of the mountain, you only need believe that today's step goes somewhere, that if we turn enough corners, walk through enough doors, we learn and grow and good things always come from learning and growing. Belief is the knowledge that if we get up and fall down enough times, we will learn to walk, to run, to dance, to skate, to write. Believe that even if we don't get all the way to our dream, we will have been better for the effort... because the alternative to getting busy living is to get busy dying. Without belief there would be no Tony Hawk, no Shaun White, no Michael Jordan and no Susan Boyle. Even if we never climb to the lofty heights we set our standards by, truly we are better off seeing how high we can fly than sitting in the stands growing harder, older and bitter. "I did not have the chance!" we cry. And perhaps we did not win the lottery of life, but it's always easier to pretend that we do not have the power - that our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.
So do not let fear and doubt crowd your mind, do not lose the war unfought, but fan your coals of hope and rise to the battle, for the world is moved by those who believe.
sources:
Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure - Marianne Williamson -
Our greatest war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives- Chuck Palahniuk from Fight Club
Get busy living or get busy dying - Shawshank Redemption - In fact if you could imagine this whole blog entry read in Morgan Freeman's voice it would be really give it a lot of gravitas.
Hope is a feeling, and faith is the discipline of hope when that feeling is gone. In a crowded subway, if hope and belief leave a seat, a passenger named fear will ride in that space. Fear and doubt fill the car with smoke if we do nothing.
Hope and belief fuel miracles. When we sit down to write, step out on stage, climb the mountain, venture into the darkness to slay the dragon, it is not common sense but hope and faith that propel us. Fear would keep us hidden in the tall grass, silent as mice.
Fear and doubt twist us into a mobius strip of anxiety. We go around ad infinitum, surfing for internet cats rather than spend that 5 minutes we promised ourselves we would work on our novel or work out. It is fear that tells us we are better off not to try - but it's belief that makes us need to try. Fear and doubt are the unseen puppet masters. If we do not fight their power we are their zombies. They trick us into believing that they are not with us, that we do not carry this dark trickster. When we confront them, they are mafia hoods, shaking a warning finger at us as we reach to open the door. I fear they will break my legs with a baseball bat, but fear is my own self, writ large in the smoke and shadows. Our greatest battle is a spiritual battle. I watch my friends losing this war: screenplays going unwritten, companies going unstarted, ideas dying on the vine like overripe rotting tomatoes. Bitterness is the post traumatic stress disorder of the creative generation.
How dare we try? Surely we are not brave enough or talented enough for our own standards.
The truth is, it's not us that achieves the dream; it is only us who takes the step... and indeed sometimes fear is right and we strike out. We are struck down. Sometimes the whole world watches and laughs and points. Sometimes our friends snicker behind our backs. And sometimes it is the worst of all, and our efforts are not even mocked - we are a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. We did not even make a sound as we fell.
But what fear would have us forget is that some times when we try, when we take up the pen to do battle with the tyranny of the blank slate, we are blessed with a gift and words that we did not know inside us flow onto the page. Sometimes, miracles happen. Belief knows that one step today is one step closer to the top of the 1000 step mountain. If you can't believe in the top of the mountain, you only need believe that today's step goes somewhere, that if we turn enough corners, walk through enough doors, we learn and grow and good things always come from learning and growing. Belief is the knowledge that if we get up and fall down enough times, we will learn to walk, to run, to dance, to skate, to write. Believe that even if we don't get all the way to our dream, we will have been better for the effort... because the alternative to getting busy living is to get busy dying. Without belief there would be no Tony Hawk, no Shaun White, no Michael Jordan and no Susan Boyle. Even if we never climb to the lofty heights we set our standards by, truly we are better off seeing how high we can fly than sitting in the stands growing harder, older and bitter. "I did not have the chance!" we cry. And perhaps we did not win the lottery of life, but it's always easier to pretend that we do not have the power - that our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.
So do not let fear and doubt crowd your mind, do not lose the war unfought, but fan your coals of hope and rise to the battle, for the world is moved by those who believe.
sources:
Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure - Marianne Williamson -
Our greatest war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives- Chuck Palahniuk from Fight Club
Get busy living or get busy dying - Shawshank Redemption - In fact if you could imagine this whole blog entry read in Morgan Freeman's voice it would be really give it a lot of gravitas.
Posted at 03:51 PM
Thu - April 1, 2010
Cover me
Every Superchick record, about two thirds of the
way through, I will make a big posterboard calender. Everything still to be
done gets a post-it and I will attempt to fit 90 days of post-its into 30
post-it spaces. It's time management Tetris, you are praying for a straight
four but you get the wrong L and your bricks are stacking up into inelegant
towers. One badly placed T and you're done. Or if you are coasting downhill on
a skateboard and you hit a rock, suddenly you are falling downhill and your
whole world becomes getting that next foot under you so it's not your face that
hits the pavement.
Right when it feels like that, I get the call that I have pushed to the back of my head by sheer denial. I know what the question is:
"What do you want to do for the cover?"
My heart sinks. I did not have space for a giant post-it that says "think of great cover concept". There are no days allocated for this. This is our upside down L, our undoing.
Back before ipods, before the Jurassic 5 era, I signed a big record deal and promptly lost control of the record and its packaging. The designer was breathtakingly exotically hot, and I stunned a roomful of people by not only disliking the cover, but proceeding to so enumerate the things I wanted changed that I made the designer cry. Men rushed to comfort her and I was vilified and made to stand in a corner. I resolved not to let that happen again. As a designer, I know I am the kind of client designers fear, since I am obviously a control freak and am not easily mollified by designer jibber jabber or being fantastically exotically hot. It is a measure of how much I care about details that I made the hottest girl I had talked to in real life cry. Now that I look back, I do feel bad that I made anyone cry. It was a harbinger of things to come: my insensitivity has made many a girl I was working with cry... except for Tricia, who once made me cry.
So for the next record deal I insisted on having control over the imaging as well as the music. I found the guy who had done my favorite album cover and hired him. I loved his work, I was thrilled to be working with him. I went to his place to see the ideas, and I was as Brian Gocher would say: "whelmed." He had laid out the photos we sent him, albeit with some nice typography. I kept talking about his other cover I loved and finally he said, "Well they had this concept which was to make it look like an old book, so I did that. You don't have a concept." And that was the truth of it - he was simply working with what we had given him. He's a very talented designer, but it wasn't his job to come up with the fantastic concept. If I wanted one I was going to have to come up with it.
For me, it's not enough to just have a cool looking cover. I feel like a lot of album art seems oddly unrelated to the music. DVD covers do a great job of letting you know what you are holding. You can tell the difference between 28 Days and 28 Days Later. I want the cover to communicate, to jangle, to add a layer of meaning to the music. It's as much a personal expression as the music is. It is the curse of being a designer. Marketing people usually want different things in a cover: they want it to be very bright and have "shelf pop." Nowadays, they want it to pop when it is shrunk to the size of a postage stamp on itunes. I deeply miss the vinyl era, although it was before my time. The 4 panel foldout of Paul's Boutique is an expansive joy. It is immersive - you can get lost studying the details.
So needless to say, when they ask me what I want to do for the cover, my heart sinks because I want the idea to be really good. Better than my greatest idea ever and better than the best album cover I've ever seen. That good. Isn't that what we all strive for? To make the best art the world has ever seen ever? Sadly I always fall short, but I sure go down fighting. It is a panicky feeling to have a hard deadline, high expectations and no idea what you are going to do. It is easy to bleat from the back seat about where we are going. It is a different thing to be driving a bus full of people with no idea where to go.
For the Karaoke Superstars record, it was Steve Ford who saw, in my design for our indie cover, what would become our icon. I had wanted to spray paint the icon on a piece of brushed metal but the designer shot me down. I settled for a metallic silver ink instead. I've heard rumors of people getting it as a tattoo. Obviously they have taken up the meaning: let your voice be heard, do not be silenced. I sure hope it isn't some guy who really really likes Tricia. Or megaphones. It was our first record and we truly deep down believed that if you wake up to your potential, you can save the world entire. We were singular optimists and hyperbolists and the cover reflects it accordingly.
Last One Picked was tough. I had whole weeks go by with no ideas. Then I had one of those nights where my brain would not shut off. Ideas came and went in a hallucinatory daze. It became bluish light outside, the birds, stirring. It became full blown hangover sunshine bright and as I was lying there listening to people getting into their cars to go to work, it popped into my head: A yearbook. The theme of the record was "the geek shall inherit the earth" and it was our lovingly penned missive of hope to the outcast, the downtrodden,the invisible. Not only did it dovetail neatly with our High School as metaphor for life theme, it gave me a direction for the photography. I'd been at constant war with the marketing people about making the band shiny and pretty so this was an excuse to do goofy "drama club" photography. I insisted everyone contribute a photo from their yearbook to make the point that we all had an awkward phase. The really wicked looking tattoo artists were once the guys who drew dragons on their trapper keepers. I wanted to emboss and gild the cover like a real yearbook but that costs money. I scattered polaroids I had taken of the recording process through the booklet including one where Tricia was singing into a mic. In order to see her face, I pulled the pop screen down which started a grassy knoll internet debate about whether we had "faked" the photos. There is some photoshop trickery in the booklet but it is because during the proper photo shoot with Melinda DiMauro, Tricia was found to be allergic to the lipstick they put on her, resulting in a bee stung look. If you'd been sucking on a hive of bees while poking them with a stick that had angry wasps glued to it. (note: due to an allergy to alcohol I have no idea what a hangover is actually like.)
Like the record itself, the cover for Regeneration was a remix of our earlier stuff. I've always loved graffiti's 'no rules' ethos and like hip hop and punk, in its purest form, it has something to say. Designer Ben Frank was on the same page and it's largely his vision that shaped the design. I realize now that I failed to credit the original artist who drew the superchick graffiti logo. I've never met him in person, but corresponded only via email resulting in this lovely lovely bit of custom typework. I'll have to send him one of my two remaining promotional skateboards we made with his artwork. Graffiti fonts give me hives, so I recruited KJ-52 into doing the tags that run through the booklet. I had just purchased a digital SLR before our european tour so many of those shots made it into the booklet. I thought it was good at the time but looking at them now, I realize I was mostly excited about Europe and a new camera.
In an earlier post, I detailed some of pain we went through to get to this cover for Beauty from Pain. There were over 50 comps made before we circled back to our original idea, which Ben Frank laid out beautifully. We were personally battered and bruised by life and we'd lost some of that shiny optimism bands have before they get ground down by the system. The broken megaphone seemed like an apt metaphor for where we were; tore up plenty, but she'll fly. I had recently purchased a holga with a polaroid back and shot the inside photography with it. It was then left on a bus and lost. We still were subjected to an outside shoot, during which Brandon could be heard muttering from the back "this is stupid, does anyone else think this is stupid?"
Later when Columbia/Sony released their version of this record, they did their own cover, which I had very little input over. I kept lobbying for a different concept until they yelled at me. Then I shut up. When Columbia/Sony tells you to shut up, you say "how high?" On the plus side, Frank Ockenfels 3 was hired to shoot us and it was one of my life highlights to work with someone that good. I blogged about that here:
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060425025821/index.html
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060426020330/index.html
and here
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060427133952/index.html
it was the last time we would use an outside photographer and the last of the big budget shoots. The end of an era.
When Sony shut down my cover concept, I used it for our next record; Rock What You Got and it fit perfectly. We were mixing all the musical colors we loved, rock black and disco gold, white stripes on chrome bling. I lovingly photographed the disparate elements in my basement and then voltroned them into a machine I wish I could build in real life. Photoshop fixed the fact that the original 4x12 cabinet is hot pink. Dave is quick to point out that the speakers are not representative of the celestions that go into a marshall 4x12. When we later had Superchick logos laser cut for the 4x12 cabinets in the music video, Dave eyeballed my vector file till it looked correct to him. When they arrived they were found to be within a millimeter of the actual marshall logos we were imitating. Dave knows his guitar equipment. Once for aesthetic reasons I used photoshop to flip a picture of him so the guitar pointed in the opposite direction. After he threw up in his mouth a little he made me change it back. It offended him somewhere in his guitarness. I believe he would rather pose naked riding a wooden pony, surrounded by angry bees.
I love this image, it is my favorite cover I've done but sadly no one else seems to like it. I keep trailing after people mumbling, 'but don't you see? the boombox is for the B-Boys, the turntable and mixer represent hip hop and the marshall 4x12 cabinet is straight up rock, that's what this record is... don't you get it? it's like a mix of everything we love... don't you get it? I believe you have my stapler....
and that brings us to Reinvention.
We couldn't settle on a name for the Reinvention record. I had been calling it "re live", which was a play on our song We Live, but also "to live life as if you are getting to live it over again". Our management thought that people might think of it as a live album so we kept brainstorming. From my notes, here's a selection:
re live, resurrection, superchick the return, refill, reborn, renew, remade, rebuilt, reconstructed, reanimated, reactivated, revolution, recharged, reinforced, reloaded, refreshed, revelation, transformed, alive.
and at the end of that long list was the enigmatic: party in a box. sometimes I'm not sure what my brain is thinking when I make notes. On a forum board, one humorous poster suggested "rocked what we had".
Out of that came several cover concepts, here's what I had jotted down:
1. Transformed: superchick logo silhouette redone as giant manga robot - lettering to feel like goverment document. people to scale.
2. Reloaded - superchick robot logo spray painted on a battered old sign. Reminiscent of District 9
3. Alive! - in the style of a marvel comic book cover - hand coming from the grave - looks like zombie but continues theme of reliving life. Typography consistent with horror comics.
4. Reanimated - also in the comic book style - melissa crawling out of the grave or playing flying V guitar in a grave - tombstone is boombox or 4x12 guitar cabinet.
5. Reborn - naked woman curled up like a fetus - symbolic of being born again - may have cables coming out of her a la the matrix.
6. Superchick - resurrection - rip off of summer glau picture from terminator tv series - partially built or destroyed cyborg Tricia, symbolizing a remade human, referencing the remade songs.
7. Robot DJ - polaroid photo of the max dj robot, spinning wax. Homemade robot composed of things max has lying around his workshop. Symbolic of max as a robot lacking human qualities.
Most of these ideas were dismissed as either "too creepy" by my wife or impractical in the time frame we had. I mocked up a couple of the ideas and settled on a cover. I described that process in the earlier blog. At some point I will post the other mockups, but this post is already a small novella in length. In fact this post originally was part of the previous one but I had to break it up lest it become the Brothers Karamazov of blogs.
If you got this far, thanks for reading.
Reinvention drops April 20th. (EDIT: thanks for pointing out my error michelle, it comes out in 3 weeks, basically a month before lost ends.)
Right when it feels like that, I get the call that I have pushed to the back of my head by sheer denial. I know what the question is:
"What do you want to do for the cover?"
My heart sinks. I did not have space for a giant post-it that says "think of great cover concept". There are no days allocated for this. This is our upside down L, our undoing.
Back before ipods, before the Jurassic 5 era, I signed a big record deal and promptly lost control of the record and its packaging. The designer was breathtakingly exotically hot, and I stunned a roomful of people by not only disliking the cover, but proceeding to so enumerate the things I wanted changed that I made the designer cry. Men rushed to comfort her and I was vilified and made to stand in a corner. I resolved not to let that happen again. As a designer, I know I am the kind of client designers fear, since I am obviously a control freak and am not easily mollified by designer jibber jabber or being fantastically exotically hot. It is a measure of how much I care about details that I made the hottest girl I had talked to in real life cry. Now that I look back, I do feel bad that I made anyone cry. It was a harbinger of things to come: my insensitivity has made many a girl I was working with cry... except for Tricia, who once made me cry.
So for the next record deal I insisted on having control over the imaging as well as the music. I found the guy who had done my favorite album cover and hired him. I loved his work, I was thrilled to be working with him. I went to his place to see the ideas, and I was as Brian Gocher would say: "whelmed." He had laid out the photos we sent him, albeit with some nice typography. I kept talking about his other cover I loved and finally he said, "Well they had this concept which was to make it look like an old book, so I did that. You don't have a concept." And that was the truth of it - he was simply working with what we had given him. He's a very talented designer, but it wasn't his job to come up with the fantastic concept. If I wanted one I was going to have to come up with it.
For me, it's not enough to just have a cool looking cover. I feel like a lot of album art seems oddly unrelated to the music. DVD covers do a great job of letting you know what you are holding. You can tell the difference between 28 Days and 28 Days Later. I want the cover to communicate, to jangle, to add a layer of meaning to the music. It's as much a personal expression as the music is. It is the curse of being a designer. Marketing people usually want different things in a cover: they want it to be very bright and have "shelf pop." Nowadays, they want it to pop when it is shrunk to the size of a postage stamp on itunes. I deeply miss the vinyl era, although it was before my time. The 4 panel foldout of Paul's Boutique is an expansive joy. It is immersive - you can get lost studying the details.
So needless to say, when they ask me what I want to do for the cover, my heart sinks because I want the idea to be really good. Better than my greatest idea ever and better than the best album cover I've ever seen. That good. Isn't that what we all strive for? To make the best art the world has ever seen ever? Sadly I always fall short, but I sure go down fighting. It is a panicky feeling to have a hard deadline, high expectations and no idea what you are going to do. It is easy to bleat from the back seat about where we are going. It is a different thing to be driving a bus full of people with no idea where to go.
For the Karaoke Superstars record, it was Steve Ford who saw, in my design for our indie cover, what would become our icon. I had wanted to spray paint the icon on a piece of brushed metal but the designer shot me down. I settled for a metallic silver ink instead. I've heard rumors of people getting it as a tattoo. Obviously they have taken up the meaning: let your voice be heard, do not be silenced. I sure hope it isn't some guy who really really likes Tricia. Or megaphones. It was our first record and we truly deep down believed that if you wake up to your potential, you can save the world entire. We were singular optimists and hyperbolists and the cover reflects it accordingly.
Last One Picked was tough. I had whole weeks go by with no ideas. Then I had one of those nights where my brain would not shut off. Ideas came and went in a hallucinatory daze. It became bluish light outside, the birds, stirring. It became full blown hangover sunshine bright and as I was lying there listening to people getting into their cars to go to work, it popped into my head: A yearbook. The theme of the record was "the geek shall inherit the earth" and it was our lovingly penned missive of hope to the outcast, the downtrodden,the invisible. Not only did it dovetail neatly with our High School as metaphor for life theme, it gave me a direction for the photography. I'd been at constant war with the marketing people about making the band shiny and pretty so this was an excuse to do goofy "drama club" photography. I insisted everyone contribute a photo from their yearbook to make the point that we all had an awkward phase. The really wicked looking tattoo artists were once the guys who drew dragons on their trapper keepers. I wanted to emboss and gild the cover like a real yearbook but that costs money. I scattered polaroids I had taken of the recording process through the booklet including one where Tricia was singing into a mic. In order to see her face, I pulled the pop screen down which started a grassy knoll internet debate about whether we had "faked" the photos. There is some photoshop trickery in the booklet but it is because during the proper photo shoot with Melinda DiMauro, Tricia was found to be allergic to the lipstick they put on her, resulting in a bee stung look. If you'd been sucking on a hive of bees while poking them with a stick that had angry wasps glued to it. (note: due to an allergy to alcohol I have no idea what a hangover is actually like.)
Like the record itself, the cover for Regeneration was a remix of our earlier stuff. I've always loved graffiti's 'no rules' ethos and like hip hop and punk, in its purest form, it has something to say. Designer Ben Frank was on the same page and it's largely his vision that shaped the design. I realize now that I failed to credit the original artist who drew the superchick graffiti logo. I've never met him in person, but corresponded only via email resulting in this lovely lovely bit of custom typework. I'll have to send him one of my two remaining promotional skateboards we made with his artwork. Graffiti fonts give me hives, so I recruited KJ-52 into doing the tags that run through the booklet. I had just purchased a digital SLR before our european tour so many of those shots made it into the booklet. I thought it was good at the time but looking at them now, I realize I was mostly excited about Europe and a new camera.
In an earlier post, I detailed some of pain we went through to get to this cover for Beauty from Pain. There were over 50 comps made before we circled back to our original idea, which Ben Frank laid out beautifully. We were personally battered and bruised by life and we'd lost some of that shiny optimism bands have before they get ground down by the system. The broken megaphone seemed like an apt metaphor for where we were; tore up plenty, but she'll fly. I had recently purchased a holga with a polaroid back and shot the inside photography with it. It was then left on a bus and lost. We still were subjected to an outside shoot, during which Brandon could be heard muttering from the back "this is stupid, does anyone else think this is stupid?"
Later when Columbia/Sony released their version of this record, they did their own cover, which I had very little input over. I kept lobbying for a different concept until they yelled at me. Then I shut up. When Columbia/Sony tells you to shut up, you say "how high?" On the plus side, Frank Ockenfels 3 was hired to shoot us and it was one of my life highlights to work with someone that good. I blogged about that here:
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060425025821/index.html
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060426020330/index.html
and here
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060427133952/index.html
it was the last time we would use an outside photographer and the last of the big budget shoots. The end of an era.
When Sony shut down my cover concept, I used it for our next record; Rock What You Got and it fit perfectly. We were mixing all the musical colors we loved, rock black and disco gold, white stripes on chrome bling. I lovingly photographed the disparate elements in my basement and then voltroned them into a machine I wish I could build in real life. Photoshop fixed the fact that the original 4x12 cabinet is hot pink. Dave is quick to point out that the speakers are not representative of the celestions that go into a marshall 4x12. When we later had Superchick logos laser cut for the 4x12 cabinets in the music video, Dave eyeballed my vector file till it looked correct to him. When they arrived they were found to be within a millimeter of the actual marshall logos we were imitating. Dave knows his guitar equipment. Once for aesthetic reasons I used photoshop to flip a picture of him so the guitar pointed in the opposite direction. After he threw up in his mouth a little he made me change it back. It offended him somewhere in his guitarness. I believe he would rather pose naked riding a wooden pony, surrounded by angry bees.
I love this image, it is my favorite cover I've done but sadly no one else seems to like it. I keep trailing after people mumbling, 'but don't you see? the boombox is for the B-Boys, the turntable and mixer represent hip hop and the marshall 4x12 cabinet is straight up rock, that's what this record is... don't you get it? it's like a mix of everything we love... don't you get it? I believe you have my stapler....
and that brings us to Reinvention.
We couldn't settle on a name for the Reinvention record. I had been calling it "re live", which was a play on our song We Live, but also "to live life as if you are getting to live it over again". Our management thought that people might think of it as a live album so we kept brainstorming. From my notes, here's a selection:
re live, resurrection, superchick the return, refill, reborn, renew, remade, rebuilt, reconstructed, reanimated, reactivated, revolution, recharged, reinforced, reloaded, refreshed, revelation, transformed, alive.
and at the end of that long list was the enigmatic: party in a box. sometimes I'm not sure what my brain is thinking when I make notes. On a forum board, one humorous poster suggested "rocked what we had".
Out of that came several cover concepts, here's what I had jotted down:
1. Transformed: superchick logo silhouette redone as giant manga robot - lettering to feel like goverment document. people to scale.
2. Reloaded - superchick robot logo spray painted on a battered old sign. Reminiscent of District 9
3. Alive! - in the style of a marvel comic book cover - hand coming from the grave - looks like zombie but continues theme of reliving life. Typography consistent with horror comics.
4. Reanimated - also in the comic book style - melissa crawling out of the grave or playing flying V guitar in a grave - tombstone is boombox or 4x12 guitar cabinet.
5. Reborn - naked woman curled up like a fetus - symbolic of being born again - may have cables coming out of her a la the matrix.
6. Superchick - resurrection - rip off of summer glau picture from terminator tv series - partially built or destroyed cyborg Tricia, symbolizing a remade human, referencing the remade songs.
7. Robot DJ - polaroid photo of the max dj robot, spinning wax. Homemade robot composed of things max has lying around his workshop. Symbolic of max as a robot lacking human qualities.
Most of these ideas were dismissed as either "too creepy" by my wife or impractical in the time frame we had. I mocked up a couple of the ideas and settled on a cover. I described that process in the earlier blog. At some point I will post the other mockups, but this post is already a small novella in length. In fact this post originally was part of the previous one but I had to break it up lest it become the Brothers Karamazov of blogs.
If you got this far, thanks for reading.
Reinvention drops April 20th. (EDIT: thanks for pointing out my error michelle, it comes out in 3 weeks, basically a month before lost ends.)
Posted at 01:22 AM
Wed - March 24, 2010
How do you make a 90 foot robot?
I missed my deadline. I finished the album cover for Reinvention about two weeks after it had left the building. The mock up cover was suddenly the real cover because I wasn't finished with the photos and was still revising the mixes and mastering when the hard deadline arrived. Actually we were 3 days past the hard deadline but the girl at EMI was gracious enough to grant us that boon. There are many stories of artists against manufacturing deadlines. Once Dave drove our 15 passenger van like he was in the Paris to Dakar rally to make the last fedex pickup at the airport. On a TobyMac record, I learned there is such a thing as same day delivery. They even picked it up at my house at the requested 4 a.m. It felt like a drug deal. I was waiting for federal agents to leap out yelling "hands in the air! do it now!"
You can see my original mock up if you scroll down a couple entries. It looks ok at small sizes but once it's blown up, it looks wrong to me.
I started roughing this out with a pencil. It was one of several cover concepts for Reinvention, I was trying to convey the idea of Superchick but bigger and louder and over the top, so rendering our iconic logo as a 90 foot robot fit the bill nicely. I had to squeeze time in for these cover concepts after we were done recording for the day since we were furiously trying to finish the album. Typically I would start at around 1 in the morning.
Here's my original quick sketch. I do all my sketching in a little notepad they gave me when we were at the cartoon network. You can read about that experience here: http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060918145003/index.html
After I had my quick sketch down, I opened Illustrator to create my 2d vector image. I don't really know Illustrator, it just came with my Adobe production package. Fortunately it's not that different from Freehand, the software I learned on. The principles of vector illustration are the same and if you paid attention during geometry, its not hard. Once I got the hang of it, I made variations on the robot till one of them felt right.
If you squint, you can see I mocked up the very original cover idea in the middle. It was meant to look like an old dog-eared operational/repair manual for a robot. Kind of a cross between a Chilton's manual and the Filter Short Bus cover. It was cool in my head but boring on the screen.
Since I was pressed for time, I tried to figure out what I could do that wouldn't take a lot of time. I wasn't trying to come up with a great cover, at this point, I would settle for any cover.
Since the robot was a two dimensional silhouette, I thought if put it against a sunset I could fudge it just enough to trick the eye. We have this field behind our house and every time the sky looks compelling, I shoot background plates for this kind of thing. Last summer was meterologically violent enough to make the show Storm Chasers interesting so I had plenty of dramatic sunsets to choose from. I was mocking up the idea so I grabbed a low res jpeg instead of my original file which was buried on a disk somewhere. I was working quick and dirty. A decision I would come to regret later.
Of course the composite looked awful, so I added some lens flare. I've been going through a lens flare phase. It's been in a lot of my work, including the music video. Len flare is tricky to add to a moving picture! I have found that a good way to ensure your wife will not have sex with you is to detail the creative way J.J. Abrams used lens flare in Star Trek. Especially if you do it while the movie is playing. To further seal the deal, watch the "making of" video and when they talk about lens flare, keep saying "see! didn't I say that they had a guy shining a light into the camera?" Once while I was pointing out common visual themes in Bruckheimer movies, my wife interrupted me with "Why do you think I care?"
With enough lens flare, the composite looked acceptable but it needed a sense of scale. Sometimes our backyard looks like the set of Alfred Hitchcocks the Birds, so naturally I take pictures. We live in the suburbs so if I see anything interesting, I shoot it. I am like the native american indians, I use every part of the buffalo. The birds helped it feel more like a 90 foot robot and less like someone in a Halo helmet from Toys R Us.
We now had a low res mockup of my idea. I sent it and an entirely different cover concept around and polled opinions. It came back 50/50 so I chose the easier to finish of the 2 options. Or so I thought.
When it came time to do the high res final version, not only was it unexpectedly difficult to reassemble the elements in a way that matched the charm of the low res one, it became clear that the low resolution was hiding some issues. Namely, when you blew up the image it was obvious that it was a two dimensional shape pasted in. It was not going to make a good poster. I gave up around five in the morning. I crawled into bed a defeated man as I listened to the birds chirping their good mornings. Stupid birds.
When I awoke a few hours later it was clear I was going to have to create it in three dimensions. I'd been trying to arrange a version of Maya on the advice of my friends at Dreamworks, but Maya costs $4000, I've been wanting to learn 3D animation ever since Neill Blomkamp's commercial for Citroen. I was on a tight timeline and I did not have a copy of Maya, nor $4000 to burn on it, so I downloaded Blender. Blender is an animation program similar to Maya but free. It's fairly powerful but it's interface is very unique and I had to teach it to myself in a couple hours, it was a lot to learn. EDIT: as I read this, I realize that I glossed over many hours of confusion and frustration. It's not like anything I've ever used before. It was like learning to walk again, but with 3 legs. I say this because it makes extensive use of the middle mouse button. Like me, many of you are probably saying, but the mouse doesn't have a middle button... oh yes it does my pretties.
Creating something 3D in the computer starts with a wireframe mesh in the shape of your object, like if you built it out of toothpicks. Then, you skin the wireframe, like wrapping it in paper and finally you tell the computer where the camera is and where the lights are and the computer spits out an image for you. Here's a detail of how I modeled the hands, as you can see, it's made up of cylinders, spheres and cubes essentially.
and here's how the computer spit it out when I was done. I didn't model the robot properly, I just wanted to get close enough so we could see it existed in 3 dimensions. I tried to position the virtual lights so they would match the positions and colors in the background plate but still give some definition to the model. The camera I put low to the horizon looking up, as you would be if you were looking at a 90 foot tall robot.
I composited it into my background plate, applied lens flare and birds and for a final touch, gave it a bit of motion blur as it were shot from by a panicky person from a car and also a touch of film grain, as if the person had not joined the digital revolution, which would explain the panic since if they were not comfortable with digital technology, a 90 foot robot would be even more cause for alarm. Many hours later and two weeks after the deadline, I was done even if it was a pyrrhic victory. I proudly showed it to my wife who said :
"its head is too small, the original one looks better."
ah! the joys of being married to your marketing director. No really, she's the director of marketing at the label. How do you think I met her? I never leave the studio.
For those of you who would like to see the fruits of my labor in hi res, you can download it in a conveniently wallpaper sized 1600x1200 at:
www.maxwax.smugmug.com
Posted at 03:26 PM
Wed - March 17, 2010
legos are the best toy ever.
When we wrote the song Alive, I asked fellow thumpmonk Gocher to do a frankenstein inspired intro piece. He did such a good job that when I played it for my management, they asked if we were going to have to negotiate the rights to the sample. I wish I could have seen Gocher doing the voices, since he had to practice the accent that was indicative of that time period. Much to my further amusement, Youtube user kyu88cne has re-enacted the entire scene in lego. I love when a little creativity gets passed around and comes back as something different, especially if it's done in legos.
You can see it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_6S6bll_PQ
rock on kyu88cne! keep being creative.
I keep saying this:
Everything is changing in media, I have seen the future and it is all of you making things in your basements and bedrooms. It is your voice that will change this world. Do not be muzzled by your doubts or your circumstances, but rise up and let your shouts be heard.
bonus points for use of lego.
Posted at 11:33 PM
Mon - March 15, 2010
Stroboscopic
What do you do when you don't have time to shoot new photos for the cd booklet and you're sick of band photos anyways? Well you fake some, that's what. I composited these out of raw footage from the Cross the Line music video. Fortunately the Red One shoots big enough images to make this possible. At 24fps I had plenty of frames to choose from. I'm always trying to capture the energy of the band and I thought this was a cool way to freeze motion on paper.
If you wanted to do this photographically, the correct way to do it is a very long exposure and a series of flashes during the exposure. You'll need a flash that has multi flash ability or very simply a cheap strobe from radio shack. I haven't tried this in awhile, but here's a shot from the last time I messed with it. You can find that original post here;
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1484559475/E559226832/index.html
and if you haven't seen it, the cross the line music video and a short piece on how we did it all by ourselves here:
http://www.maxwax.smugmug.com/
and if you ever wanted to learn wire flying, it's all there too.
Posted at 02:35 AM
Wed - March 10, 2010
Like water around.
I always told myself that when I got rich, I would build a studio and fill it with the creative toys necessary to make music, movies, photography or art. Then I would throw the doors open to anyone who wanted to learn but could not afford it. Back then, the only tools were in big studios. I worked for free just to be around people who made records. I borrowed gear from friends when they weren't using it. I was a teacher's assistant so I could get keys to the school studios. I would start editing at midnight in video edit bays after everyone had gone home. I got used to going home when the sun came up many times. It was the only way to learn. You had to want it.
I never got to build that compound, but thanks to the miracles of modern technology, my dream has come true. The tools are affordable to almost everyone. Take this piece of software for example. It's a bunch of cool music tools that we used to pay a lot of money for. Back in the day it was probably $10,000 worth of stuff. Most of it looks very familiar to me, I would borrow the individual pieces from different people and wire them up just like this and happily make bleeps and bloops till it all had to go back to it's respective owners. Now you can do it in software. At home. I'm assuming if you are reading this you have a computer, so it's available to you. Here's the best part. It's free.
http://www.hobnox.com/index.1056.en.html
Obviously not everything is free, but nonetheless, if you can afford a computer, almost everything is available. Computers can be had for less than $500. Digital cameras, going for less than $250 used, Video cameras coming in at $150 for used flip cams. Guitars to be found used for under $100. Almost anyone with a summer job can take a shot at a dream now. You might have to flip some burgers to get there, but for about a summer of mowing lawns you can be the next spielberg or rick rubin. It's up to you. In addition to all this cool low cost creative stuff, there's lessons for just about anything on the internet. You don't even have to take your bike to the library anymore. (still a good resource though). Whatever it is, someone, somewhere on the internet has a video showing how it's done. I'm learning blender right now, thanks in no small part to internet tutorials. Blender lets you do 3d modeling and it's free too. There's also gimp which is free and similar to photoshop. In the last 5 years or so you've seen me learn photography and videography and it's mostly been from gleaning the internet. I haven't had a class since college which was a long time ago. We taught ourselves wireflying. And of course we posted a video about how we did it. Hopefully someone won't kill themselves trying to learn it now...
The tools are available to you, the instruction is available to you and when you are done creating, the whole world can see it now.
What a unique time in history we are in. I had lunch with a very cool guy who said "we are looking at the renaissance again" and I totally agree with that. Thousands of kids with no adults to tell them that it shouldn't be done that way. The revolution starts now. Look around, you are the revolution.
Now, the only thing holding you back is you. Be like water. When you reach an obstacle. Go around. If you have the tiniest crack, water will find a way in. Water cannot be stopped and wears down even stone over time. Start with the belief that it can be done. If you believe, you can find the will. The will is the most valuable asset you have. If you lack the will than take a cue from personal trainers and set yourself up to win. Start something with a buddy who will keep you going. Or hire someone to show up and listen to you play music every day. Trade accountability for something they want to do. If you can't do it alone, find people to make music with. If you can't find people in your town, then find people on the internet. Gocher who is my other half in ThumpMonks lives in New Jersey. I've seen him once in the last 5 years but he's worked on almost every record I've done in that time. If you want to be a professional ice skater and you live in Africa, you might have a problem, but almost everything else is solvable.
Let nothing stand in your way. Dream, learn, practice and express yourself through your dream. Don't be proud of how cool the songs on your ipod are. Be proud of the music you make. Living in an expensive vibey loft does not make you vibey. You are buying other people's vibe and hoping to associate yourself with it. Make your own art. Express your own creativity. Cook, customize motorcycles, make records, movies, whatever it is, do it. Define yourself not by what you consume, but by what you create.
If you are getting angry right now, ask yourself, why you would be angry with someone who is telling you to go for your wildest dream.
'I bring the pure flow, like water around, the rocks of life won't pull me down....' - from the song pure by superchick.
Posted at 12:01 AM
Mon - March 8, 2010
Abandon in place
We hit our deadline, so I had to stop reinventing and hand over this record for Reid to mix. DaVinci said "you never finish art, it is only abandoned" and in my case, I'm never finished, I just hit a deadline and I try to get my children as dressed and ready as possible for the big wide world before I shove them out the door. Sadly sometimes the weaker ones get a quick comb through the hair and a t-shirt before they are shoved out so we can spend more time on the stronger siblings, hoping that the best songs will carry the whole family. When I decide to take a song from its embryonic demo state, usually just one verse and chorus in rough form all the way to its mixed and mastered term, it's because I have developed a vision for how I hope it will turn out. It never turns out as well as I can hear it my head, but hopefully it turns out ok. The ones that I agonize over are the ones that fall short of that dream. When the deadline hits, it's like what NASA did with the moon mission: abandon in place. The project is left on the moon, frozen forever in that state. You wonder if the song was ever any good, but more hauntingly, you wonder if you were just one small change away from it all coming together...
The beauty of a remix record is that I get to open that moon base up again. When we did our first remix record, we were able to go back to Hero and make the music fit the message in a way we didn't the first time around. Princes and Frogs became a complete, albeit short, song and many of other songs got sonic facelifts. You get better at doing things and you go back and fix your paper-thin guitars and re-sing your songs. It's a rare joy for someone who lives perpetually wondering if he could have done it better. I think people could tell that just as much passion went into our remix records because it sold as well if not better than our other records.
And here we are again, several records later, reopening up songs and seeing if we can improve them before the timer runs down. Aha! Speeding this song up 5bpm does open up all kinds of new possibilities and makes what was heavy and leaden into something purposeful and epic. Aha! A shift to relative minor gives this song the soul we had always hoped for. They are revelations and joys and we tried new sounds, new clothes and climbed over the fence to see what could be found on the other side. It's a kind of freedom because you are not bound to any expectations of how your band should sound or how cohesive a record should be.
And on the other side of the Superchick fence, we found new things. Matt and Tricia are both breaking out their own sounds and it was fun to see what colors we had that we hadn't used before. My fellow monk Gocher remarked: "this is your nest of spider eggs you are launching into the world," which was an appropriate way to describe what is happening on this record, especially seeing as the ThumpMonks joined superchick on a remix of one of my favorite songs ever from all the way back to the first record. We invented and reinvented, and when we were done there were 3 new songs and 9 remixes and it is by far the most diverse thing we have ever released.
But for it to be done, there had to be a deadline - otherwise I would twiddle the songs forever. We hit the deadline a month behind schedule, which I made up for by working 20 hour days 7 days a week for 3 weeks in a row, an awful way to work. You have no objectivity, no ability to tell why something is not working and you fight demo love and fatigue in the mix and you frustrate your mixer till he threatens to kill you. But it has to be done because you cannot fight City Hall or the EMI release schedule. It agonizes me to 'abandon in place' each song yet again and all the blood, sweat and tears become frozen into digital ones and zeroes like a mosquito from jurassic times locked in amber for future generations to see for all time.
Nonetheless, it is out of my hands now and we wait with crossed fingers and bated breath to see how our kids do on their first day at school.
Posted at 02:45 AM
Wed - January 27, 2010
Sat - October 31, 2009
Why I drive a honda civic.
I once lived in a house with 11 guys. We raided
dumpsters at night for food. We found a cache of discarded sunny delight and I
drank so much of it that to this day I can't drink sunny D. Especially since
one of the guys who slept by the water heater took to peeing in an empty
container at night and we found the sunny D branded jug of black liquid long
after he moved out.
I lived with friends when I could, I lived in my car if I couldn't. (only a couple nights, mom and dad!) I lived in a house where if you put your hands on the carpet they would smell like cat pee. We couldn't steam it out. Later the cockroaches drove us out of that house. I've had my electricity cut off. I drove without windshield wipers for a year because I couldn't afford to get it fixed. I applied for a mechanic at church to fix them and the church gave me money to have it fixed at a regular shop. I didn't take the money, I knew my lifestyle was a choice and the money should be for someone who didn't have a choice. Later when I had to take the car in for something unrelated, the mechanic said "oh I fixed your wipers for you". When I asked him how much it cost he said "oh nothing, the linkage just popped off, I put it back on." On the plus side I can snowboard in blinding snow since I've learned to navigate on vague shapes.
I had milk crates for furniture and salvaged wood for shelves. We raided college dumpsters for cast off couches. I lived in a room with bare light fixtures. A friend of mine came over and looked at my sad room and she said :
"it's so romantic".
And it was. She wasn't looking at the rusty car, the cat pee on the carpet or the cockroaches. What she saw was the sacrifice. I was giving up everything for something. I was charging the gates. All the shields were set on forward. It didn't matter where we were, it mattered where we were going.
I spent all my money on gear and what equipment I still needed I would borrow. I would line up a couple days where I could piece together a semi functional studio from different friends. Then I would record furiously without sleep until the gear had to go back. (I still somehow have Ian Eskelin's Alesis data disk from that era) I took every chance I could find. I called 50 studios downtown about internships. Literally every studio in Chicago. No one wanted me. I called every video house. I went in for one interview where the guy had me come downtown to tell me : "Columbia college graduates X kids a year with a broadcast major, why should I give you a job?" I ended up interning at a video facility doing audio for video, which meant a lot of washing vans and emptying trash. I turned that experience into doing free music videos with a VHS camera. That lead to me being in a music studio the day they got a computer to do music. I volunteered to show them how it worked. I was there working for free for 6 months before they gave me my first record. We sold 10,000 units of it. We stopped at Walmart on our way to the first festival and bought pajamas. We wore them on stage since our slot started at midnight. It was a blast. We went on tour in a chevy lumina van. One of our band members failed to bring a toothbrush. For the whole tour.
It goes on and on and on. There are stories and stories and stories. Playing a festival in New Zealand for 20,000 people that went nuts when we hit the stage. Falling out of a hotel bed on tour when we heard our music on the X-games. Staying in the theatre while the credits rolled and our song played. A gold record with my name on it. Going to the Grammy awards as a nominee. And most importantly, an itunes review that starts with:
"this album was the soundtrack for my summer."
What an honor that is. Truly I couldn't ask for more than a review like that from a fan. It wipes away the negative reviews that once left me too depressed to leave the bathtub for an evening. (there wasn't any water in it.)
The story doesn't end here. It goes on. I taught myself photography, I'm learning to make movies. I'm driving my sister's 2001 civic instead of the BMW 5 series I could have bought with the video gear money. I live in a small house so we don't have a big house payment. I keep my expenses small so I can afford to keep trying new things. My table and chairs are from Ikea. The chairs were $19 each. My wife and I argued over whether we should have 4 or 6 of them. She wanted 6. We have 6.
More than one person has said to me wistfully: "I wish I could do what you do". And I've always wanted to say to them; You can! Move back in with your folks, sell your new car and your matching furniture! give up everything you can, get by on an artist's meager pittance and hurl yourself at the gates. I grew up as a missionary kid and I wore out of date second hand clothes and we drove second hand cars and we had second hand furniture. But I grew up knowing we did it for a purpose. And that's what you get when you give up all the normal stuff: purpose and adventure.
That's just me though, I'm weird like that. It's not for everyone but I sure don't look back and wish I'd bought a BMW in 1995 instead. Then I'd be sitting in my matching furniture reading about other people's adventures instead of writing about my own.
EDIT: I'm not opposed to BMWs, I'm just saying that if you're working solely to pay for your nice things, you can't chase your dream. Unless your dream is to own a BMW, in which case, you're set.
I lived with friends when I could, I lived in my car if I couldn't. (only a couple nights, mom and dad!) I lived in a house where if you put your hands on the carpet they would smell like cat pee. We couldn't steam it out. Later the cockroaches drove us out of that house. I've had my electricity cut off. I drove without windshield wipers for a year because I couldn't afford to get it fixed. I applied for a mechanic at church to fix them and the church gave me money to have it fixed at a regular shop. I didn't take the money, I knew my lifestyle was a choice and the money should be for someone who didn't have a choice. Later when I had to take the car in for something unrelated, the mechanic said "oh I fixed your wipers for you". When I asked him how much it cost he said "oh nothing, the linkage just popped off, I put it back on." On the plus side I can snowboard in blinding snow since I've learned to navigate on vague shapes.
I had milk crates for furniture and salvaged wood for shelves. We raided college dumpsters for cast off couches. I lived in a room with bare light fixtures. A friend of mine came over and looked at my sad room and she said :
"it's so romantic".
And it was. She wasn't looking at the rusty car, the cat pee on the carpet or the cockroaches. What she saw was the sacrifice. I was giving up everything for something. I was charging the gates. All the shields were set on forward. It didn't matter where we were, it mattered where we were going.
I spent all my money on gear and what equipment I still needed I would borrow. I would line up a couple days where I could piece together a semi functional studio from different friends. Then I would record furiously without sleep until the gear had to go back. (I still somehow have Ian Eskelin's Alesis data disk from that era) I took every chance I could find. I called 50 studios downtown about internships. Literally every studio in Chicago. No one wanted me. I called every video house. I went in for one interview where the guy had me come downtown to tell me : "Columbia college graduates X kids a year with a broadcast major, why should I give you a job?" I ended up interning at a video facility doing audio for video, which meant a lot of washing vans and emptying trash. I turned that experience into doing free music videos with a VHS camera. That lead to me being in a music studio the day they got a computer to do music. I volunteered to show them how it worked. I was there working for free for 6 months before they gave me my first record. We sold 10,000 units of it. We stopped at Walmart on our way to the first festival and bought pajamas. We wore them on stage since our slot started at midnight. It was a blast. We went on tour in a chevy lumina van. One of our band members failed to bring a toothbrush. For the whole tour.
It goes on and on and on. There are stories and stories and stories. Playing a festival in New Zealand for 20,000 people that went nuts when we hit the stage. Falling out of a hotel bed on tour when we heard our music on the X-games. Staying in the theatre while the credits rolled and our song played. A gold record with my name on it. Going to the Grammy awards as a nominee. And most importantly, an itunes review that starts with:
"this album was the soundtrack for my summer."
What an honor that is. Truly I couldn't ask for more than a review like that from a fan. It wipes away the negative reviews that once left me too depressed to leave the bathtub for an evening. (there wasn't any water in it.)
The story doesn't end here. It goes on. I taught myself photography, I'm learning to make movies. I'm driving my sister's 2001 civic instead of the BMW 5 series I could have bought with the video gear money. I live in a small house so we don't have a big house payment. I keep my expenses small so I can afford to keep trying new things. My table and chairs are from Ikea. The chairs were $19 each. My wife and I argued over whether we should have 4 or 6 of them. She wanted 6. We have 6.
More than one person has said to me wistfully: "I wish I could do what you do". And I've always wanted to say to them; You can! Move back in with your folks, sell your new car and your matching furniture! give up everything you can, get by on an artist's meager pittance and hurl yourself at the gates. I grew up as a missionary kid and I wore out of date second hand clothes and we drove second hand cars and we had second hand furniture. But I grew up knowing we did it for a purpose. And that's what you get when you give up all the normal stuff: purpose and adventure.
That's just me though, I'm weird like that. It's not for everyone but I sure don't look back and wish I'd bought a BMW in 1995 instead. Then I'd be sitting in my matching furniture reading about other people's adventures instead of writing about my own.
EDIT: I'm not opposed to BMWs, I'm just saying that if you're working solely to pay for your nice things, you can't chase your dream. Unless your dream is to own a BMW, in which case, you're set.
Posted at 01:38 PM
Thu - October 22, 2009
another fortune cookie
average effort = average
results
for extraordinary results apply.......
for extraordinary results apply.......
Posted at 01:36 PM
Mon - October 12, 2009
Wire flying
I posted some additional pictures and diagrams on wire flying at:
www.maxwax.smugmug.com
I did actually write out a blog post on all the crazy hurdles we had to overcome to pull off this video, but it got to be the length of a small novella. It was so long my wife didn't even want to read it, so I just posted some pictures instead.
wire flying is dangerous, so for legal reasons, I advise you not to even look at the pictures.
Posted at 03:55 PM
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Published On: Oct 19, 2010 11:10 PM
Published On: Oct 19, 2010 11:10 PM