As I posted earlier, I regularly run a live drawing show on Ustream called SWEATSHOP. I draw, paint, and chat live for the Ustream audience. We have run benefits for injured friends, busked with sketching for spare change, stayed up far too late watching Special Victims Unit, and generally had a jolly good time. This time, I’m offering you the benefit of my 20+ years of art experience, all from the comfort of your own computer hole. Strong tea & loud music ushers us into the SWEATSHOP ATELIER (aka DISCOUNT ART COLLEGE) in ~20min.

This time on SWEATSHOP: Ask your art, design, or miscellaneous questions. I will answer to the best of my ability, with demonstrative diagrams drawn live on paper.

$5 gets you a 10 minute lecture on the topic of your choice! We begin when the first question comes into my PayPal account at eliza DOOOT gauger ARF gmail HURRGH com.

SWEATSHOP [Justin.tv]

Hit the jump to watch Sweatshop live on Ectomo!

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The very idea that a baby body requires different fluids than a full-grown corpse somehow arouses my fancy. The concepts of death and infancy are heavy on my mind these days, as my generation comes into power, as my father shakes his massive head and warns that gas and food prices will never go down again, that this is what he was warning us about since the fifties.

I think he prays that this isn’t the End of History. At some point, he says (or I remember him saying, admittedly different things), innovation and notable incidents will cease to occur or we will become inured to them, and history will stop. There will no longer be anything worth recording. Humanity will subside into limbo.

I just received a voicemail from Qais, who was appointed this week’s Toontwink via lottery, pleading, and feats of strength. The message was mostly garbled screaming, which I take to mean he’s still busy with his Flynn DeMarco sleepover or whatever.

Seeing as I am currently at my day job, dreaming about my real job, propped by a tripod fashioned of human femurs over a sweltering keyboard, this is really all we can afford: a casually perverse Japanese TV drama about a scorned woman who finds a beautiful young man half-dead in a cardboard box, and then, wait for it, drags him into her apartment.

Originally intended as a Japanese remake of the Seattle documentary film about my quest for Ectomo’s new writers (“Bughunter Q: Eliza Gauger and the Search for the New Scum)”, something is lost in the translation, here. But the essence, the geist of the tale is the same.

Please enjoy, with our compliments, the first episode of Kimi Wa Petto.

My dears, my sweet darlings, my everythings, my sins and souls, my readers. I feel as if sticky veils of honey-snot are being dragged off my starved gills. Like a stone toad, I am reborn from muck. And how I long to shake and shiver and splatter it all over your eager cheeks.

Well. Seeing as our posting schedule is more relaxed than it once was (no longer is Ectomo in the first wild urgencies of youth), I have turned our Twitter feed back on. Meaning: Twitter user Ectomo will now report when a new post is posted, as it will with this very post. POST.

I am pleased to announce that in addition to my slow recovery from the worst case of burnout in recorded human (or wookiee) history, I am also in the thrall of preparation panic for the sake of two overlapping art shows, in Seattle, in September. One a group show, with a cadre of my prestigious peers, the other a lonely solo redux of my bizarrely successful Lighthouse Roasters show. More on that when I have flyers at hand, I suppose.

Until next time, droogs.

milkman [Flickr]

Infusionist’s Log, Byrd Research Station, Day #308

I’ve spent the last four hours checking my watch, the station clocks, the Russian broadcast television that dribbles in from Russkaya station during the storms. Mostly, it’s 4pm. Mostly. We brought almost enough tea, but I use the bags twice, mostly out of fear. I can see too many grim futures, see us trapped in some snow-in for weeks, buoyed only by strong cups and thick cream.

I miss rain, frankly. And noise. I miss black, glistening nights in breathy cities; I miss the undulations of power lines beyond an accelerating car. I miss tea that stays warm for more than a few gulps. I miss tea that doesn’t crystallize.

Sure, I signed up for it. We all did. Brownlee brought in the contract one day and sat down with us, earnestly propping his elbows on his knees and underlining words like “compensation”, and “retirement”, and “phonesex”. We were seduced, enthused! We started biting and hitting and climbing over one another, just to get to our empty suitcases!

That night, our last night in civilization, we celebrated. We fools, we babes in the wood, we celebrated. Qais turned to me, well into his second cream cheese log, and threw one of his junky-limbs over my scapula. “Isn’t this what we always wanted, E?” he slurred, spraying almond slivers. “This is why we did it. The blog, the jointly-published papers, the letters to the Lancet, the black-tie nude revues. We finally got our funding. We’ll be able to prove everything.” I tugged his hair and laughed, then.

Well, bitterness is my cream cheese now. There was no “research facility”. There was no “heated dorm”, nor “Swedish masseuse”. There was a hot tub, yes, but a dank waft blew from under its protective tarp, and we could summon no will to lift it. Sometimes we find Ross standing on the tiles, barefoot and swaying. He says he has always been an accomplished sonambulist, a claim for which some of his prescription bottles make a case, but during these spells he does not have the slack absence of a true sleepwalker. No, he watches. He looks for something. Something I think I can smell, on evenings like this.

They’ll come back inside, soon.

5 x 7″ Claybord sketch, one of a set of three, for the Ectomite who ended up fixing my MBP screen.

Adam’s Commission [Flickr]

Same deal as last time, gentlemen: you find me in the heaving crowd, I’ll do you up an Octobee, on the house. (clue: my hair is mintyblonde, and I will be dressed as a biplane-hijacking escapee from Mad Max’s personal bellydancing troupe)

This is Bong-Ra’s first US tour, and he’s augmented by a lineup of excellence including Pneumatic Detach, and Enduser, craftsman of one of my and Qais’ all-time favorite albums, Bollywood Breaks.

Ectofriend DJ Intoner, who put the show together, will be spinning between sets.

In case you, my treasured readership, are not yet familiar with Bong-Ra, allow me to advance the notion that he is fucking insane:

As for the rest of the cast, just click your dainty pointers below to be bathed in the relevant phat beats.

Bong-Ra pre-show tickets available [DNA Lounge]