Slavan's Fall

Slavan’s Fall

He had seen the grate numerous times on his way to work at the Broad Nation Delivery Service. Often on the long walk to work through the dense city streets his mind would move from considering the multitude of packages and parcels he was bound to deliver to the topography of the sidewalk he was walking on. Everyday as he turned the last corner next to the grand Broad Nation Delivery Service he enjoyed staring down the deep dark chasm under it’s metal threading. The grate itself was unusually large, taking up eight square feet of the dingy sidewalk and although one could see a ways down the hole was it clogged with thick, black pipes like sable tree trunks and was very dark. The hole eventually led to a subway platform, which he knew because every once and a while he could hear an automated female voice say, “The L train is now arriving,” and the clamoring of the train.
One day, as his feet clacked on the metal grate he heard a voice from under the grate say, “I need you.” It sounded just like the automated voice of the train platform, but it was filled with subtle emotion. It trickled meekly up to him from inside the dark hole. He wasn’t sure if his mind was playing tricks on him. He was so familiar with hearing the platforms voice everyday that it had blended into the noise of the city; that is until now. The voice spoke again, “ I need you. I love you.” He started to laugh out loud to himself. “That’s awfully personal for an automated machine” he said, “It must be some kind of gag.” He continued on his way to work.
On the very next day as he passed over the same large grate he heard her voice again. “I need you. I love you. I want you,” it said.
“Alright, that’s a fine joke, but you gotta know when to cut it off,” he said with a furrowed brow.
“I need you. I love you,” she cooed.
“I said that’s enough!” He screamed and stormed down the street.
Now you or I would not have paid this voice much more than mild curiosity. We certainly would not have devoted any strong emotions to it. But, he is not like us. He had no family or friends, not even a faithful pet. He was oppressively lonely. He had been so solitary for so long that he had forgotten what desire or companionship felt like. When the sputtering voice from under the grate admitted it’s tender feelings to him it cut through his thick layers of suppression and ripped him in two. A flood of long discarded emotions came back to him.
The next day he walked around the grate and onto the busy street where cars honked at him and screeched their tires. To his surprise he didn’t hear the voice. He paused and listened closely, but all he could here was the distant echo of people boarding the subway and of course, angry motorists. So he continued to walk to work.
For the next few days after that he walked around the grate and the voice did not call out to him. Occasionally, he would hear it say, “The L train is now arriving,” but nothing more. In a way he missed the voice, after all there was no one else to tell him they loved, or needed him. Some how he felt even more alone. This may be why he walked across the grate again. He stepped on it slowly, one step at a time and squinted into the dark hole. Suddenly he heard it, “I need you. I love you. I want you.” “yes,yes,yes,” he said and ran off.
Each day afterward he walked over the grate and when she spoke to him he would drop a little present down to her through the spaces in the metal threading. At first it was a little piece of candy. Then he dropped flowers down to her that he got from the florist on top of his apartment. He would talk to her as he slipped his presents to down the hole. He would say, “I need you. I love you. I want you.”
On a particularly rainy and lonely night he took a walk to see her. From a distance he saw a large white truck with orange lights. Construction workers had lifted the massive grate and were doing some work on the pipes. He felt as if pitiless strangers were invading his love, they would laugh at him if he tried to talk to her. When he tried to pass under the line of yellow tape surrounding the hole a massive hairy man in an orange hard hat stopped him.
“Sorry boss, we’re doing some work here. You’ll have to go around.”
His face grew hot. “But I don’t want to go around, I want to see her!”
The large man looked confused.
“Look nut, get lost,” the big man said.
He pushed the construction worker out of his way and ran toward the hole. Another worker emerged from the hole.
“Stay away from her,” the man screamed at him and pushed him aside.
The construction workers grabbed at his coat.
“It’s a forty foot drop you stupid bastard!”
He dove down into the deep hole and for a moment the air was cool and everything turned a soft, thick black, but suddenly the pipes grew thicker and he slammed head first into the tiny gap between them. He tried to squeeze through, but he only managed to get stuck upside down. The air was acrid and musty, his eyes burned and he couldn’t see. He wailed in pain,
“I need you. I love you. I want you!”

artistic progress goes blarg

Very sick of school and classes. But, my bike trip from Baltimore down to the dirty is in five days and counting so I'm stoked for that. Here's a class project I did, it's an add for a wild life park and another croquil doodle of myself.

my muse the many faced minstrel of misinformation

I just got back from New York this morning at 6:00 am, I'm in that space between reality until I can get back on my Savannah schedule. My trip was good on all fronts, a good us of my time and treasure as a late English lord would describe it. Anyway, I bought some inks and paper to draw with and I ended up with a croquil; I never use them but Kate said I should so I did this drawing below. So if you think is sucks blame Kate, because I never use croquils. Just kidding of course...I still use croquils once and a while.
oh! Also I threw it in photoshop of course.


-yours, ect.

chicken vs the Nat City Knar Reeper

here's another poster, this time of Patrick. I'm not settled on a few things, but it looks good to me over all.

Knar reeper

this is the line work for my next bike poster

mini marcos

this is the final munny I did for the munny show here in the dirty.

frankenstamp

finally finished with this slock Frankenstein stamp for class. Also, I had to do a long format rap for Hotels.com.

Hermes

The pungent smell of basura and hot gravel reminds me of Mam and the Pines in the summer of 89. We lived on the corner of Palm and Meadow avenues, which are laughable names to anyone who has seen my neighborhood. The mass lay-offs of line workers from the looming Tucker’s Tomato Paste plant on the edge of town was in conjunction with the garbage workers strike. Towering piles of lumpy black trash bags stood between our bedraggled salmon colored stucco apartments, all baking in the August sun. There was no work to be had anywhere, so most people sat on their stoops in clumps and listen to the radio or lay lazily next to an electric fan. Mam made us stay in side our musty apartment.
“Look at those lazy’s sitting around like lizards,” Ma said to me. She had her purple slacks on, the ones she wore for job interviews or when we took trips to the social services office. Manuela was sitting in her little Oscar the grouch booster seat swinging her little feet into the under side of the table. She was restless, Mam rarely let us out to play with the other kids. I didn’t mind much, didn’t get along much with the other kids, but I felt bad for Manuela.
“Sure the factory closed, but you got to make money, you got to eat. What do they think, if you don’t move you won’t get hungry?” She cracked open some peanuts with her strong hands. “Stop kicking my table baby, eat some nuts.”
All day Mam would clean our cracked tiled floor or heave away another piece of dad’s furniture with Uncle Gabriel to pawn down the street.
Soon there was no more furniture. The electricity was turned off, along with the water. Mam had to fill up the tub and toilet with water from our neighbors hose. She used to sneak under my window every morning, but I see her. I started putting out juice for her, so she’d know that I was grateful. She stopped sneaking after that.
Everyday my stomach ached more, it mumbling to me, pleading for food. Our refrigerator was long gone and my sister and I would sit and stare at the clean rectangle on the wall it had left.

I meet a man on the stairs who wasn't there...

I'm starting to take these series of pictures with word bubbles with random objects and people that tell a story. The story and the object will be totally unrelated...or will they?

MR. Frank: back in black

he's a little scarier this go around, some said he looks like he's got a beard going. I feel like I'm okay with that, every man should have a respectable beard.

EZLN

This is the finished poster for the munny's show this friday.

I am wet

It's been a hundred and five degrees outside with unmeasurable amounts of humidity, it's got me sweating more than a whore in church.

Brandon's flying down to the grand ol dirty to see me, so here's how! Our bike trip is going to start in less than two weeks.

yours, ect.

Deny Deny

We had precious little to do that very dry summer in our precious little town of Vandusenville. Ronnie spent half his time elbows deep in thick iron steamers for Fran Igan in Domainy's laundromat. The other half he spent with me retracing the same worn brick streets we'd tread since kinder garden. Vandusenville was oppressively familiar, it was rare that anything new eeked it's way into our valley town.

Ronnie liked to imagine that he was a hardened detective in a booming, malevolent metropolis. He would watch The Long Kiss Good Night over and over again, so much so that the Murphy's Video made him buy the movie since Ronnie wouldn't let anyone else watch it. He started to wear his father's old grey suit with a loose collared shirt under it. We'd sit in the bowling alley parking lot most Saturday nights. The neon lights cascading across the roofs of musty parked cars and the high pitched ring of bottles in the lane's barroom reminded me of some dark city with dark people and even darker secrets. Ronnie would pace in front of me, twisting a wooden toothpick between his thin lips. "Of course I'm nice baby, I'm a detective," he'd say over and over with a smile. He was transforming into a new animal right in front of me, he was becoming something new and exciting. Ronnie seemed to contain all the possibility for creation in the universe under his dirty sport coat. I decide to give him a flat foot name so I called him Phil Deny.

When the sun was high and the ground was too hot to walk on we'd find refuge under the 17 bridge that reached over the dried Lee river. The grimy concrete supports of the bridge pierced the hot ground and provided a tall flat canvas for Vandusenville's budding artists.
A week before the end of August Ronnie's father decided to send him to private school next Winter. His father was the local minister with all the pomp and square jawed morality you'd expect. The school was forty miles away.

We wrote "Phil Deny" in black paint on the largest concrete support. We wanted to remember this summer, when our tiny town became the shifting shadows of a tumultuous and sinister city. I wanted to remember Phil Deny forever.

In November a deep frost threw Karin's High School sweet heart off the 17 bridge, which ended his life. Karin never slept and other night. One late, restless night she plodded along the edge of thew empty river to the underside of the long arched bridge. Her heart beat against her chest faster and faster as she reached the site of the crash. His old Ford still lay in the deep snow. She didn't feel the slicing Winter wind or the deep freezing chill. Suddenly, she saw written on the concrete support the name Phil Deny. Did she think it was a message from her lost love? Or was seeing his name laid out so prominently too much for her little heart? Without pause she threw herself down a chasm between the looming concrete supports.

The police found her the day Ronnie was to leave for private school. Ronnie read the paper religiously ever since he'd taken to being a detective type. He had worked out the cause of Karin's death that morning over his Cheerios. We stood on the shore of the empty river and watched the endless parade of navy clad police retrace the same path along the chasm. They were snapping pictures and leaning into each other to make comments.

"Phil Deny's dead," Ronnie said to me. These days I often forget what Ronnie's face looked like, but the image of Phil Deny is burned into my memory forever.

It's alive-ish!

I've been spending so much time on personal work that I totally forgot to do my homework. I cranked out this Frankenstein's monster for today's class though.

daffy with wanton waiting?

I find that I'm often caught in the crossfire between reality and expectation. The big hand and little one continue their tireless marathon, quite contrary to even their wishes I think. I would like a brief pause so that future or destiny could not be so immediately pertinent. I take many entitled breaks, but it's a bit like staying still on an escalator.

Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

This is very neat. You can see more for free at future shorts on yutube.com.Ben is very sleepy, he's been up til five coloring inside the lines. He would like to shot himself in the jaw, but there's just so much left to do. On the up side I've found my note book under a pile of clothes and I just got some sweet pannier bags for my next bike trip!

heart of teflon

My wife left me after an extensive erotic tour of Gillespie’s verdant midtown. All the while I sat at home unaware while she pointed her feet to the sky and emptied her head of any sense of duty, commitment, or regret. I brought her to sleeping around, she said, because I showed her little attention in carnal matters. It seemed to me that the punishment didn’t nearly fit the crime. If a dog bites you rap it on its nose and send it outside, not empty out your rifle into its gullet.

part a new story.

yours, ect.

Vivo Gentes, Vivo EZLN!

what's up party people?! This is the line work for a new poster for the Munny show. It's a bull bike with a EZLN skeleton and Commindante Marcos riding on it. I'm not sure where I stand on the Zapatistas really, I'm in favor of all legit peoples movments, but I've here some not so favorable things about the EZLN too. Anyway, I'm stoked on this poster.

Yours, ect.