A Gallery Of Work

Highlights:

• SF Chronicle Junior Art Champion, two times in 1957 or ’58.
• Leather purse design featured in Vogue Magazine, early 70’s.
• Winner, SF Advertising Club Cable Car Award for copywriring, Direct Mail category for Steve Martin Fan Club. Late 70’s.
• My pot-bellied pig, Yoshi, becomes the first pig on the worldwide web in early 1994, when Yahoo! was still hand-coded in HTML daily and the animal page had about fifty listings.
  
• Two musical compositions, 3 Seconds Before Maia Smiled (video) and Ibi Mel Ibi Apes (Where there is honey, there are bees) (video), enter SF MOMA permanent collection as part Glenn McKay’s light show installation, Altered States, which ran for six months in1999.
• Pixels At An Exhibition named #1 iPhone photography website by Mashable, 2010.
• Pierce Street Community Garden, Coalinga, CA. 2016. See below.
• My podcast, Riding The Wild Bubble, one thousand episodes and counting. Available wherever high quality podcasts are served.
• Apple developer
• Expert in WordPress, InDesign, Photoshop, etc.

My website, right here, is a repository all my art, music, writings, videos, podcasts, and so on.

If you believe I can be of use to your project, whatever it might be, I will bring the sum total of decades of experience, exploration, experimentation, and discipline to it.

Highlights:

• SF Chronicle Junior Art Champion, two times in 1957 or ’58.
• Leather purse design featured in Vogue Magazine, early 70’s.
• Winner, SF Advertising Club Cable Car Award for copywriring, Direct Mail category for Steve Martin Fan Club. Late 70’s.
• Two musical compositions, 3 Seconds Before Maia Smiled (video) and Ibi Mel Ibi Apes (Where there is honey, there are bees) (video), enter SF MOMA permanent collection as part Glenn McKay’s light show installation, Altered States, which ran for six months in1999.
• Pixels At An Exhibition named #1 iPhone photography website by Mashable, 2010.
• Pierce Street Community Garden, Coalinga, CA. 2016. See below.
• My podcast, Riding The Wild Bubble, eight hundred episodes and counting. Available wherever high quality podcasts are served.
• Apple developer
• Expert in WordPress, InDesign, Photoshop, etc.

My website, right here, is a repository all my art, music, writings, videos, podcasts, and so on.

If you believe I can be of use to your project, whatever it might be, I will bring the sum total of decades of experience, exploration, experimentation, and all my creative energy to it.

Pixels At An Exhibition, the book.

This book is available as a print-on-demand edition at lulu.com. $95. 9″x12″ 356 pages. Over 600 hundred images from around the world by 177 artists, curated from the Pixels at an Exhibition website, many of them available nowhere else.

The book is also available in digital format for the iPad and Mac on the Apple Bookstore. $14.95. It looks great on both! 

Three-and-a-half years in the making. 8.5″x11″, 350 pages, 137 artists, 600+ images culled from thirty thousand curated images on my website, Pixels At An Exhibition. Curation, writing, lay-out, design, production of press-ready mechanicals.

Below, a slider gallery of page spreads from the book.

Three-and-a-half years in the making. 8.5″x11″, 350 pages, 137 artists, 600+ images culled from thirty thousand curated images on my website, Pixels At An Exhibition. Curation, writing, lay-out, design, production of press-ready mechanicals.

Below, a slider gallery of page spreads from the book.

Curation and Fine Art Printing

The Oakland Airport asked me to go through a hundred years of archival photos and help them select twenty seven of the most historical import. I then prepared them for printing and oversaw the museum-quality framing of the selected images.

What a great project! Here are some of the [unretouched] images we chose.

Infographics and Interactive Design

My experience with interactive design goes back to the late eighties with Apple’s Hypercard. I mastered Macromedia’s Flash around the turn of the century, but then it was ruined by Adobe and mercy-killed by Steve Jobs with the advent of the iPhone. All that to say, all my animations are gone! Again, the victim the ephemeral nature of digital media.

Here is a gallery of infographics from the past few years. 3D and motion graphics services available.

The Bats of Helicon, a recent (and fun) book of poetry project.

The cover of a book, The Bats of Helicon, I did for San Francisco poet Jim Cohee.

Below, a couple page-spreads from the book.

Pixels At An Exhibition, the website.

I launched the Pixels At An Exhibition website in November of 2009 along with a call for submissions for the first ever juried gallery show of iPhone photography, which would open at the Giorgi Gallery in Berkeley on January 30, 2010.

We got an immediate write-up in the New York Times, followed by a feature in the San Jose Mercury-News once the show opened. Over the years, we have gotten press from around the world, including a Voice Of America interview that was broadcast throughout the Middle East during 2012.

Apple asked me to do presentations on the nascent medium for the public at their stores in San Francisco, Santa Monica, NYC, Chicago, and London.

I helped put together a three-day event at MacWorld 2013 for iphoneography, including exhibits, speakers, and a panel discussion in the main conference hall.

Pixels has been revamped to include other art forms. The old site of 30K curated images is no more, but we have the PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION book to document it. It remains a labor of love.

Album cover for the “the seasons {remixed/remastered} album.

Camera-ready art for the tri-panel cd cover for the album, remixed and re-released in 2016.

Album cover for the “the seasons {remixed/remastered} album.

Camera-ready art for the tri-panel cd cover for the album, remixed and re-released in 2016.

A few words about iPhotographer/P1XELS Magazines on the Apple Newsstand

iPhotographer Magazine was a project that consumed most of 2013, and, later, as P1XELS Magazine, most of 2015 and early 2016.

iPhotographer Magazine was tale of passion betrayed. I met and partnered with a self-described “visionary” who wanted to publish a magazine about iPhone photography. The first thing I said to him at our first meeting was, “People must get paid.” He said, “Of course.” On the basis of that conversation and a vague contract, I worked nonstop for the next eight months and created the magazine, calling in the goodwill I had created in the community, running the Pixels website and doing the shows and getting the press and promoting the artists, to build an actual team whom I promised would be paid in the future.

When I published first issue on the Apple Newsstand, we made the Apple Hot List immediately and had 7,000 subscriptions within two weeks at $20 apiece. I told the guy, okay, time to throw down. He declined. I walked, along with my crew. A couple years later, photographer Baron Wolman of Rolling Stone Magazine fame, proposed relaunching the magazine with him as Publisher. We produced six issues, but we never recovered from the collapse of the first iteration. Part of it was due to the changing nature of the community along with Apple’s failure to make the Newsstand work or to promote it properly. Obviously, no issues exist anywhere, except on my hard drive. It’s on my list to put all the issues up on the Pixels — The Art of the iPhone website. Someday.

Whenever I hear someone describe him or herself as a “visionary,” I run away now.

BELOW: thumbnails from the magazine horizontal scrolling navigation menu that would pop up at bottom of the page. This is about half an issue’s worth. In all, I created three issues of iPhotographer Magazine, published one on the Apple Newsstand, and published six issues of P1XELS magazine.

Some logos.

The Pierce Street Community Garden, Coalinga, CA

The Pierce Street Community Garden

A.K.A. The Hippie Who Fell To Cowtown

I hit Coalinga hard in early August, 2016, drummed out of Oakland by a jealous landlady and skyrocketing rents.

Years before, tweakers had trashed the little house into which I was to move. It had been empty since then and it showed. I slept on a foam pad on the floor as I worked to make the place livable. My only furniture was a lawn chair. I lived on roast chicken from SavMart, Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, and burritos from Tres Agaves, the all-night taqueria which serves the best food in town. The temperature hovered around a hundred and five degrees every day and the swamp cooler attached to the house was non-functional. Truth be told, I had never seen a swamp cooler before and I didn’t know what it was.

Eventually, I learned what the swamp cooler was and hired a handyman who fixed it. Blessedly, it worked pretty well. I got through refinishing the floors, painted the bedroom and, at that point, was able to set up my bed and bring the dresser in from the garage. Talk about civilized!

That was when the bizarre reality of my move to this tiny town in the middle of a desolate nowhere began to sink in. The alien culture and the unforgiving environment and my own isolation within both took a daily toll. Finding three dead cats in the street over a period of two weeks contributed to my malaise.

Over the course of one weekend in late August I had crisis of confidence. I had lost any faith in my ability to do anything at all, ever,  in music, in art, in life itself, including adapting to life in Coalinga. After much soul-searching, prayer, and discussion with close friends far away, I came out on the other side. By Sunday afternoon, I was okay again, in acceptance of my situation, at peace once more, and back into action mode.

That evening I discovered four orphaned kittens, three or four weeks old, under the house. I had found their dead mother the prior morning, outside in the street. Again, the Divine working in my life. It is impossible to worry about oneself when bottle-feeding four kittens and potty-training them! In a few weeks, they had progressed to eating solid food. I was able to place them all in happy homes up in the Bay Area.

Work on the house proceeded at an acceptable pace and, by October, I had the place furnished, the bookshelves up, art hung, and a stove in the kitchen. No more SavMart roast chickens. I haven’t eaten one since.

By this time I had made friends with a couple people in town, including Patrick Keough, a city councilman and Mayor Pro-Tem of the city. We would meet at Starbucks in the morning and have long discussions about the many issues facing the city. Late one morning after a particularly long conversation about how some Coalinga teens suffer from an inferiority complex just because they are from the town, I pulled up in front of my house, got out of my car and looked at the empty lot next door, a true eyesore, and thought, “That would make a great community garden!” I texted Patrick and shared the thought. He suggested how I could track down who owned the lot.

It turned out the City of Coalinga owned the lot and there had been talk for some time about doing a community garden there, but the idea had never gotten off the ground. For the next four months I was consumed with moving the project forward, dealing with government entities, jumping through hoops, doing research, lining up donors and gardeners, planning, and so on.

Patrick introduced me to Chris Macaluso of the Canna Agency, a medical marijuana research firm, at the time building a facility in town, who offered to sponsor the garden.

We broke ground officially in early March of 2017. I already had gotten the lot graded and the irrigation system in place. Chris showed up with a crew and we got all the planting beds built, along with the fences and entry-way tiered raised beds over three intense days. Luckily it wasn’t too hot, yet.

In the early stages, I went through a number of design revisions, based on input from from Chris and others involved. My garden assistant, Leona, kept bugging me to add some small planting beds in which kindergarten classes, for example, could plant and maintain. I knew I wanted a sundial as a centerpiece to the garden and one day, it hit me in a flash: I could put the sundial in the middle of the garden and put a ring of 4’x4′ planting beds around it and make one of them a sandbox. Once I committed to that idea, the layout of the garden just radiated out from that central circle. The sandbox gets lots of use.

I’ve had any number of people tell me that the garden is the most beautiful community garden they have ever seen. Needless to say, I love hearing that, even if I doubt it’s true. The garden continues to grow and change, as you can see in the photos. We have a real community of enthusiastic gardeners (many novices) contributing to the garden’s ongoing evolution.

It has been a wonderful experience and a tremendous amount of work, but well worth it. The garden is both my sanctuary and a gift to my current home town. I didn’t do it alone, of course. I’ve met some great people who have contributed a lot and continue to do so.  Many years ago, it was revealed to me that it is in our human DNA to serve one’s community, that service is an essential component of true happiness. Building the garden has reaffirmed that.

I hit Coalinga hard in early August, 2016, drummed out of Oakland by a jealous landlady and skyrocketing rents.

Years before, tweakers had trashed the little house into which I was to move. It had been empty since then and it showed. I slept on a foam pad on the floor as I worked to make the place livable. My only furniture was a lawn chair. I lived on roast chicken from SavMart, Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, and burritos from Tres Agaves, the all-night taqueria which serves the best food in town. The temperature hovered around a hundred and five degrees every day and the swamp cooler attached to the house was non-functional. Truth be told, I had never seen a swamp cooler before and I didn’t know what it was.

Eventually, I learned what the swamp cooler was and hired a handyman who fixed it. Blessedly, it worked pretty well. I got through refinishing the floors, painted the bedroom and, at that point, was able to set up my bed and bring the dresser in from the garage. Talk about civilized!

That was when the bizarre reality of my move to this tiny town in the middle of a desolate nowhere began to sink in. The alien culture and the unforgiving environment and my own isolation within both took a daily toll. Finding three dead cats in the street over a period of two weeks contributed to my malaise.

Over the course of one weekend in late August I had crisis of confidence. I had lost any faith in my ability to do anything at all, ever,  in music, in art, in life itself, including adapting to life in Coalinga. After much soul-searching, prayer, and discussion with close friends far away, I came out on the other side. By Sunday afternoon, I was okay again, in acceptance of my situation, at peace once more, and back into action mode.

That evening I discovered four orphaned kittens, three or four weeks old, under the house. I had found their dead mother the prior morning, outside in the street. Again, the Divine working in my life. It is impossible to worry about oneself when bottle-feeding four kittens and potty-training them! In a few weeks, they had progressed to eating solid food. I was able to place them all in happy homes up in the Bay Area.

Work on the house proceeded at an acceptable pace and, by October, I had the place furnished, the bookshelves up, art hung, and a stove in the kitchen. No more SavMart roast chickens. I haven’t eaten one since.

By this time I had made friends with a couple people in town, including Patrick Keough, a city councilman and Mayor Pro-Tem of the city. We would meet at Starbucks in the morning and have long discussions about the many issues facing the city. Late one morning after a particularly long conversation about how some Coalinga teens suffer from an inferiority complex just because they are from the town, I pulled up in front of my house, got out of my car and looked at the empty lot next door, a true eyesore, and thought, “That would make a great community garden!” I texted Patrick and shared the thought. He suggested how I could track down who owned the lot.

It turned out the City of Coalinga owned the lot and there had been talk for some time about doing a community garden there, but the idea had never gotten off the ground. For the next four months I was consumed with moving the project forward, dealing with government entities, jumping through hoops, doing research, lining up donors and gardeners, planning, and so on.

Patrick introduced me to Chris Macaluso of the Canna Agency, a medical marijuana research firm, at the time building a facility in town, who offered to sponsor the garden.

We broke ground officially in early March of 2017. I already had gotten the lot graded and the irrigation system in place. Chris showed up with a crew and we got all the planting beds built, along with the fences and entry-way tiered raised beds over three intense days. Luckily it wasn’t too hot, yet.

In the early stages, I went through a number of design revisions, based on input from from Chris and others involved. My garden assistant, Leona, kept bugging me to add some small planting beds in which kindergarten classes, for example, could plant and maintain. I knew I wanted a sundial as a centerpiece to the garden and one day, it hit me in a flash: I could put the sundial in the middle of the garden and put a ring of 4’x4′ planting beds around it and make one of them a sandbox. Once I committed to that idea, the layout of the garden just radiated out from that central circle. The sandbox gets lots of use.

I’ve had any number of people tell me that the garden is the most beautiful community garden they have ever seen. Needless to say, I love hearing that, even if I doubt it’s true. The garden continues to grow and change, as you can see in the photos. We have a real community of enthusiastic gardeners (many novices) continually contributing to the garden’s ongoing evolution.

It has been a wonderful experience and a tremendous amount of work, but well worth it. The garden is both my sanctuary and a gift to my current home town. I didn’t do it alone, of course. I’ve met some great people who have contributed a lot and continue to do so.  Many years ago, it was revealed to me that it is in our human DNA to serve one’s community, that service is an essential component of true happiness. Building the garden has reaffirmed that.

Flapping, The Novel

Flapping, The Novel

Cover for iBooks & Kindle edition.

I was attempting to write the weirdest novel ever. I think I came close. In the late 1990s, I decided to do a limited hand-bound edition so I could send a copy to David Bowie. I don’t know if he received it from photographer Mick Rock, who had agreed to hand-deliver it. In 2002, I self-published a paperback edition that regularly sells on Amazon for $150 now. I’ve seen it as high as $500 and even, once, $999. Not sure if they sold at those prices! Flapping is now available in iBooks and also a kindle edition.

I was attempting to write the weirdest novel ever. I think I came close. In the late 1990s, I decided to do a limited hand-bound edition so I could send a copy to David Bowie. I don’t know if he received it from photographer Mick Rock, who had agreed to hand-deliver it. In 2002, I self-published a paperback edition that regularly sells on Amazon for $150 now. I’ve seen it as high as $500 and even, once, $999. Not sure if they sold at those prices! Flapping is now available in iBooks and also a kindle edition.

Cover for the paperback edition.

The book came with a cd, “Flight of the Atom Bee,” which is available for free at Bandcamp.

Cover for the paperback edition.

The book came with a cd, “Flight of the Atom Bee,” which is available for free at Bandcamp.

Epilogue

For no reason I can recall, I started compiling a list of every job, position, occupation I have ever had over the course of my life.

• victorian costume jewelry maker/designer
• tractor repair shop helper
• carpenter’s apprentice/carpenter
• bike mechanic**
• cook in halfway house**
• retail store clerk
• leather goods designer/craftsman
• newspaper copyboy/wire attendant/editorial assistant
• printing company shipping clerk
• bindery worker
• copywriter
• novelist*
• memoirist/podcaster*
• graphic artist /production artist
• proof reader**
• artist**
• art director
• magazine editor
• model/actor**
• book publishing production assistant
• book designer*
• trucking/courier company manager
• printer/copy shop manager
• paperboy
• commercial printing account/print broker
• web developer/project manager
• art gallery show curator/producer
• animator/flash
• scent designer**
• guitarist/singer**
• composer/producer/arranger/sound designer**
• garden designer/landscaper*

* Made no money at this
** Made very little money, or very short duration of engagement