Cool Naked Lunches

Last Friday, Mandy and I went to the Birth of Cool exhibit at the Blanton Museum. If you live in Central Texas, or the exhibit tour comes to your town, I highly recommend it. But that may just be because, as my wife said "It's like an everything Brad loves exhibit." There was no fighting sports, praying mantids or Hamlet performances, but it was close...

The exhibit focuses on the retro-modern movement, especially as it relates to the west coast. The exhibit features furniture protoypes from Eames, Miller and more

It also had lots of great images from West Coast Jazz, and stations to listen to pivotal works. When we went, (it was an event for museum members) they had a combo playing Dave Brubeck. I love Brubeck, especially Time Out. I have a record player at the office and have worn down that album, probably much to the chagrin of my office neighbor, Frank.

The greatest part of the exhibit though was a wall where 3 TVs played 3 cartoons; "Beep Beep", by Chuck Jones, "Gerald McBoing Boing", and "Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom" directed by Ward Kimball. It was so great to be in a museum, watching people watch these cartoons, especially seeing folks laugh out loud still to the Chuck Jones cartoon.

When I was at the museum shop I came across a postcard of William Burroughs, which was kind of synchronicity. Not because I am big Burroughs fan, (though I have a great recording of him reading that is pretty fun), but as I started to say in my last post, I have been working on trying to start a figure drawing class for animators in Austin.

I used to love figure drawing, and have not gotten enough of it in the past 8 years.

So I have been trying to find a place to hold classes for the past 4 months. It has been surprisingly hard. I followed many dead ends, and had some very bizarre encounters. I wont name names, but there was someone who wanted to charge each student $50 per student, per class...just to hold the class in their space.

Details will follow soon, but we have a date. I am very excited.

The first class will be May 30th. I wanted to have the class around lunch time on Saturdays. So I thought we would call it "Naked Lunch." Thus the Burroughs reference. Ironically the models will not be fully "undraped," as Prof. Schiffhauer would say, because folks will be able to get drinks (coffee and beer) from the coffeehouse next door and there are apparently laws about nudity and liquor proximity, even if it is for the purpose of learning how to draw.

On another topic, I recently customized my laptop. I bought a Toshiba Satellite R-15. It is a tablet PC, (you can draw directly on the screen) and has a larger monitor than most tablets (14"). Rich Simms at Powerhouse, let me try one out, and I was tired of being chained to my Cintiq at night. Unfortunately, they dont make them anymore, so I had to get one used and take it to a shop to fix up, but the outside was still very scratched up. I asked the gentleman at the repair shop how I could paint the laptop. He told me I was crazy. So I decided I definately had to paint it. Here is how it looked:

Here is what it looks like now:

And it runs like a champ. Hehe. I know, I could have been working on cartoons. Speaking of which, this week is pretty crazy...hope to share more soon.