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Little Brother

Originally uploaded by pablodefendini

The Little Brother print is finished, after a weekend in the printshop, featuring various mishaps and frustrations, and many, many learning experiences (may those never end!). In all, I have ten copies that need a good home, so if you want one, and are willing to PayPal me some shipping money, leave me a comment. First come, first served.
And for the latecomers: don’t worry. I’ve now perfected the process for this print—I’ll print more at some point in the near future, and make a large (50-100) edition.

As I spent Memorial Day weekend in the print shop, I paid close attention to the progress of NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander via its Twitter page. Although we’ve sent unmanned probes to Mars before (waaaay back during the Viking days, and the Mars Rover mission), Phoenix seems to be igniting a small amount of excitement about space exploration again, which can only be a good great fantastic thing. At this time in history, when the world is mired in various crises stemming from mankind’s lapses in judgement and refusal to work together on a global scale, we need a little bit of the wonder and optimism that space exploration seems to instill in us all. While I would not equate Mars Phoenix’s landing with Neil Armstrong’s first steps on Luna by any means, I do think it’s a step in the right direction. 

With that in mind, I turn your attention to a short manifesto which seems to be grabbing people’s attention this morning. SFC William H. Ruth III, of the 101st Airborne Division, has written a short essay, volunteering for a one-way mission to the red planet. In his words:

“While reading Jim McLane and Nancy Atkinson’s thoughts on Space Colonization, I started to realize that we ‘ALL’ have lost our way. We have become so consumed by petty differences and dislikes of others that we all have forgotten our pre destiny of something better. We above all other living organisms on this planet were given the tools to advance and to expand our thoughts past simple reproduction and survival. What will we ultimately do with that destiny? Will we falter at a hint of death or danger? Or will we do now what so many in ‘ALL’ of the world’s history has done before us.
Here is an ‘Out of the box idea’, let the hero’s of ‘All’ our countries, for once, risk the ultimate sacrifice for something greater than one man’s idea. Maybe once let these men and woman that rise every morning and say ‘today I will stand for something’ and say ‘evil will not prevail, not on my watch’. For once let them volunteer for us all, you never know, mankind, the human race. It might just catch on if we let it.”

I can’t begin to express how much respect, admiration, and genuine awe I have for this man. Ruth is made of the stuff that makes for great military men heroes: the determination and tenacity to get a job done, in the service of something greater than him/herself, but without losing sight of their humanity and their place in the greater scheme of things, as a member of the human species. People like SFC William H. Ruth give me hope for humanity.

1- Apartment hunting.

2- Frakking Twitter.

3- Putting the final touches on the Little Brother print (see previous post).

4- An Advance Reading Copy of Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale.

5- GTA IV (but not as much as you’d think).

6- A corporate brochure for a freelance client.

This is the final iteration of my Little Brother piece. I’ve re-worked the Camera-Head, and added some more detail to its blazer. In the end, as soon as I realized that I was designing a poster (for myself) as opposed to a mass market book cover (for the particular needs of the mass market), I decided to leave the idea of a textural background aside. For similar reasons, I’ve also replaced the Neil Gaiman blurb with the book’s tag-line, and integrated the arphid graphic from the spine of the cover design.

I’m diggin’ it.

Tomorrow, I’ll go get myself some ink and figure out the separations. I’ll get the seps printed on Friday morning, and hopefully will be in the print shop at Pratt by mid-afternoon. I’m itching to get back in there—it’s been way too long. . . . 

Here’s a progression of that Little Brother sketch I put up a few days ago. This is what happens when I have a weekend to myself. I’ve had lots of fun putting this together, particularly including little easter eggs (hints: run the binary through a translator; check out the ‘maker’s brand’ on the arphid on the spine, etc.). It’s not done—there’s still much work to be done on Mr. ‘Camera Head’, and I feel like it needs some textural elements, possibly in the background. Myabe a city-scape? Some DHS-type seals or other government type printed matter? Who knows, I’m still turning it over in my head.

Most likely this will not be used for the actual cover, but in any case the feedback so far has been good, so I’ll definitely be making silkscreen prints of it at some point.

My cover for The Good Fairies of New York was turned into a wallpaper, and is being given away for free (as in beer) on tor.com. Get over there and snag it, along with Eric Fortune’s beautiful cover art (one of my favourites, actually) for The Red Magician. Also, if you haven’t done so, sign up for tordotcom—still in the works, but so worth it once we go live in June (I think).

EDIT: According to PNH: tor.com‘s actual launch date is July 20. Lunar Landing Day. 

Wait till they put this in glasses, and combine it with cheap, wearable computing devices… Imagine walking down the street and getting real-time contextual info about the people, buildings, landmarks, shops, etc. you see. Fantastic.

Yesterday Liz and I cut out early from work (shhhhh.) to catch the Dave Eggers-curated exhibit at apexart, Lots of Things Like This. It was a short, fun little show featuring humorous combinations of words and pictures (or ‘cartoons and prints’, to the less pretentious among us) by people such as David Mamet, Shel Silverstein, Ralph Steadman, R. Crumb, and Art Speigelman, among others. It was a wonderfully funny, precious, and well-put-together show, precisely what one expects from Eggers and co.

Lex caught up with us at the gallery, and we then made our way to Union Hall in Park Slope, where we finally caught one of their Secret Science Clubs. Up on stage was Dr. Wallace Broecker, Columbia professor and author of Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat–and How to Counter It. Dr. Broecker spent some time talking about his research into climate change, and his opinions about what we could do about the situation, on a large, pan-national scale. No compact fluorescent light bulb initiatives here: the man proposes taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and ‘burying’ it in saline aquifers, or the deep sea, among other methods. Unfortunately, though, these solutions cost lots of money and equipment, money that governments are traditionally very reluctant to spend. Because then they couldn’t pay for, you know, their war machines and shit.

Anyway, in all: a very stimulating and informing afternoon and early evening.

 

Little Brother Sketch

Originally uploaded by pablodefendini

Trying out Flickr’s ‘Blog this’ feature. . . Let’s see what happens. This is a sketch inspired by Doctorow’s Little Brother, which may turn into a book cover, but probably not. If not, I’ll turn it into a print, either silkscreen or woodblock. We’ll see.

EDIT: Well, it worked, although Flickr told me it didn’t. Also, it doesn’t seem to play nice with the WordPress theme I’m using. Sheesh.