Carnet de Voyage

With my writing collaborations with Amanda Miller, I haven’t been forthcoming about my plans for Inquiry Project. I’ve been slowly working on setting up the collaborative. There are a couple of projects pending. I’m introducing one, which is one of my pet design projects. The OC will be a Zine in the design tradition of Ray Gun. The Zine aims to creating discussions about the culture of Orange County. The County has been the star of a couple of television shows. Its image, however, continue to be disproportionally represented. There are many interesting and exciting things happening within the confine of the Orange Curtain. When I was teaching the Visions Magazine class for Cypress College, I attempted in doing something similar with my class. This Zine furthers my ideas that I began in that class. I hope to begin in modest—a 32-64 page Zine that reports the County from a first person point of view.

I am looking for submissions. If you have something that you would like to express regarding the County, you are welcomed to contact me and submit an article. Also, I am looking for submissions of artwork by young and emerging artists who live and work in the Orange Curtain. If you are interested in contributing to the Zine, send me an email at jrojsirivat@gmail.com.

Sometimes geek moments happen without warning. We all know this very well. I’m not sure how it happens to me personally. It’s almost like when I’m out in public, I don’t notice people anymore. Well, I do. But then I focus in on things they do, or use, or wear.  And if I think it’s cool, I have my geek moment.

I wonder if that kind of act comes from being trained to be that way. Sometimes you end up thinking visually so much, that’s all you really notice.

I was at this sushi place in Long Beach today getting some food with my mom. As I was leaving, my eyes were sweeping the place. I noticed a smallish Game Boy in this guy’s hand. Obviously, it couldn’t be an actual Game Boy unit. Unless somehow he had bought a miniaturized clone of it.

So I walked up to the guy and interrupted the lunch he was having with the girl sitting opposite him, and asked if it was a phone case, and where he had gotten it. The answer? Apparently, our mass industrialized, Communist/Capitalist wunderkind and economic partner China produces many wonderful, cool things. The guy said he got it off Ebay, and that it might have already been sold out. (I did some investigating, and you can actually get it off Amazon.)

I don’t know if I would ever profess myself to be someone who knows what’s current and cool at this point in my life. There are just too many of those things to keep up with. And, really, there are so many sub-categories of coolness in our culture today. You may have your pulse on one thing, and you’ll be completely out of touch with something else.

But this Game Boy iPhone cover is cool. Sure, it’s completely non-functional aside from inciting a sense of nostalgia. But that’s exactly why it’s cool to me. Or everybody else really. It reminds me of those greyscale Tetris blocks free falling on that terribly tiny, green, and incredibly low-res screen. I makes me think of Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ, and all the Game Boy music that got created on that handheld system. (I have this 15-minute Game Boy remix of Depeche Mode songs that I would never throw out from my iPod even if I don’t listen to it very often.)

Sometimes you go out and you notice something that you think is cool, and you sort of have this little geek moment. And somehow even that is cool, too. Do we even remember a time when openly exhibiting that kind of behavior would be considered blasé? Now that nerds rule the world, we all can have our moments of random, cool, geekiness. And that’s exactly how it should be.

Game Boy iPhone cover. Do they have a Tanooki Mario that I can put on my Android?

You know, sometimes you just spent your time a little too long in
Arkham Asylum.

I was in Las Vegas this weekend. My friend Jason had told me about the Pinball Hall of Fame the last time he was in the city so I decided to check it out. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend at the museum. I was enthralled by the vast amount of machines there, particularly the older ones. I loved the graphics on these machines. The older machines especially have a charm to them. The next time I am in town, I will have to visit the place again and spend more time playing the pinball machines.

I work mostly with computer graphics so in recent years I have had fewer and fewer opportunities to frequent an art supply store. There are times, however, when I do need some old school, traditional materials to work with. Case in point, Friday. I needed some good old drafting supplies so I drove down to Art Supply Warehouse to stock up. I lost—or rather, misplaced—a lot of my art tools during the renovation last summer. I’m just being too lazy to go do the hunt for those needles in the hay stacks. (Getting my life back together after that event is a whole other story entirely.) Although I really should since one of the items just so happened to be the nib holder that my father gave me when I was 3. I made my first drawing with it, and it has come along with me—even with my move across the Pacific—all these years. I have used it in every possible writing and drawing scenarios. It definitely deserves heirloom status at this point.

I am digressing.

In any case, I walked out of the store with about $90 worth of French curves and templates. I told Ed Giardina this, and he thought I was a weird-o for spending so much money on something like French curves.

When I was a student in college, this was the place to go for supplies. I have bought many drawing papers, pencils, drawing boards that kept disappearing on me, sketchbooks, and God knows what else. It is still the place I go when I need something. These days, the supplies haven’t changed much: graphite pencils, erasers, nice pieces of Strathmore art paper.

What I really like is that they have a pretty good drafting section. Perfect for when you need $90 worth of French curves, right? I know that I have Sketchbook Pro on my computer. But sometimes it’s just nice to draw things out by hand. Also, it all seems quicker to me. But you can’t own enough French curves. You just won’t know which ones you will end up using. Besides, those French curves are so darn nice to look at.

The only reason I will frequent the brushes section is when I need a No. 1 and a No. 3 Winsor Newton to ink an illustration. Oh, you can use them for paintings. How do you paint again? (I only took two painting classes in art school. In the second class at SFAI, the teacher said during the critique that mine was the best painting he had ever seen in 5 years. Since I had no idea what I was doing with the painting, or even what I was supposed to do with those paints, aside from pushing them around on the canvas with the pallette knife, I decided to walk away from my career as a Sunday painter completely.)

These rows and rows of pens are too colorful to ignore.

You know, I’m sure there are better art supply stores around. The thing about me is that I often go with the least resistance. I can order electronic parts from Jameco or Mouser, but when I need something quick, I just drive down to JK Electronics. Art Supply Warehouse is no difference. My friends tell me about stores in Los Angeles that I should frequent. I just think it’s ridiculous for me to make that long drive when all I need is a couple of inexpensive graphite pencils.

About six years ago I started my blog Triphop’s Uninverse. At the time, I had wanted to do something that was reminiscent of the old xeroxed zines that I used to scoured Factsheet Five to order. The blog was supposed to be my little notebook that I keep. It was to contain all things that I was interested in.

Over the years, the blog shifted and changed. What had started as a blog that encompassed all of my interests turned into an art and design blog. That was a very natural progression since those were the things that interested me most. I began to post images of my journeys to art openings around the Orange County and Los Angeles areas. Those were great times, going out to see all that was happening in the local art world. Along the way, I continued to post things I found that I was into. Illustration, graphic design, music.

What began with me writing about those things, however, started to disappear. Because of my lack of time, at a certain point, the blog became a tumblelog. I was doing Tumblr before the mass exodus to Tumblr. That worked out for awhile, but my desire to write returned. I had wanted to write lengthier entries for the blog. I started toying around with doing interviews with those artists and musicians that I was interested in. But because of lack of time, that never moved forward in a successful way.

What I also desired was to have a blog that was more personal. I had started to post about my life to a varying degree. But because my blog had become so much about art, design, and music, those posts never fit well into the broad content of the site.

So here we are. Carnet de Voyage. My little diary about my travel through life. I will still share things art-related as I find them. But this will be where you can come to find out about me. New beginnings are always a good thing. As they say–Bon Voyage!