I’m delighted and slightly panicked to announce that the book I’m drawing, Anthony Bourdain’s Get Jiro!, co-written with Joel Rose, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Delighted, because this has been a giant project for me, and it seems unreal that it will become something other than a huge heap of pages on the corner of my desk.  Delighted also to see my cover with bold title text and the colors by the very accomplished Dave Stewart.

Panicked, since I can feel my deadline’s breath on the back of my neck, and there’s a pointy thicket of holiday between now and the last page.

Even the mellowest yellowtarian will find hirself gripped by the hemp mittens of righteousness, and thrown upon hir enemy like a slice of marinated zucchini onto the biodieselly-combustive hibachi of duty.

Jiro finds the best food in town in its filthiest restaurant. Get Jiro! will be out Summer 2012, published by Vertigo.  Written by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose

I owe you one, my friend.

-Langdon

Encircled by the monolithic battlements of luxury condominiums, LA’s Inside The Ring is the private playground of the palate for the vapid, self-absorbed, Superich.

From Get Jiro! due out Spring 2012.

So I was drawing a closeup of a dangling hand the other day.  I was really pleased with it.  It didn’t come out fully-formed and appropriate, of course; I had to wrestle with it for fifteen minutes, but once it came out  it looked really natural, in a way that I feel most of my hands don’t quite.  I had that rare, eerie feeling of… satisfaction.

However, observing that the hand was so prominently placed in the panel, I felt it should be contributing to the action of the hand’s character of telling a driver to turn a van full of culinary henchmen into a sketchy part of town, and not just hanging there, looking well-drawn.  Great. Decision made. I’ll redraw it with a raised finger.  The problem was that that I didn’t want to erase it.

This happens so much in my art… I fall into the tidepool of a detail on a page, swim among these spinning diatoms of details, and the polyps of intuitive proportions, and surface only to realize that what I’ve drawn too big, too close to the vending machine, has way too many glowing buttons for 3th century Greece, or is directly behind the main character whom I totally forgot to draw.  Considering erasing it must be like what Abraham felt while figuring out the itinerary for taking his son on a really gloomy field trip.

But today it hit me- Once I’ve drawn the picture, it can never be undrawn…  Sure, it can be erased, but the act, once complete, is irreversible. No amount of erasing will erase that it had been drawn.  Indeed, its creation is burned into my body along with ten thousand hours of other draw-ings.

The act of drawing is a act of memory.  We imagine a subject we want to draw, so we send the instructions to our hand.  Our hand puts something down, and it’s probably a skewed, mocking vapor of what we intended.  But this isn’t our hand’s problem, nor its connection with our mind; It’s because our mind doesn’t really yet understand what it’s asking the hand to draw.  But the eyes and freshly seared muscle memory have recorded the image just drawn and convects it back into the brain, to  contribute to the concrescence of  the subject with another pass of refinement.  The paper is essentially external memory augmenting the brain in an effort to truly apperceive the subject of the drawing.

I think that’s the entire exercise of art.  Just like a Socratic lecturer isn’t trying to teach his subjects, rather he needs an audience before whom to explain his ideas to himself, so is the drawing merely a method for creating an object as saturatingly and penetratingly as possible.  This object exists in the memory of the mind and body; The drawing is merely its scaffolding, merely its consequence.

So, I feel better about erasing that hand.

]]> http://www.lllama.com/the-permanence-erasure-foretells/feed/ 0 http://www.lllama.com/happy-holidays/ http://www.lllama.com/happy-holidays/#comments Tue, 28 Dec 2010 02:20:54 +0000 Langdon http://www.lllama.com/?p=426 more »]]>

By the Knights of Columbus, that was a crazy stretch.  The holidays are so dense and frantic that I feel like a little squirrel dashing around trying to remember where I stashed my acorns, or a bear stuffing as many grubs and berries in my furry cheeks so I can sleep until spring, except for a shrub break every couple of weeks or so.  Now that I put it that way, it sounds perfectly normal, and kind of inviting. Gone in this civilization are the myths born of shortening nights filling our hearts with the dread of a long winter; Rather, here are the days of baking cookies and packing as many calories into bodies and glucose into our bloodstreams as humanly possible.  Do we slow down in winter because it’s our biological imperative to survive winter, or because we’re in a constant state of sugar-crash?

In that vein, I made fudge using sweetened condensed milk instead of evaporated milk.  Megan told me after (after I ate a whole batch by myself, that is) that condensed milk adds almost 200 calories per two tablespoons. No wonder I feel like I’m ready to sleep until spring.  It wasn’t even that good- There was so much sugar that it couldn’t all melt into a smooth, creamy block of goodness.  It was more like eating a brick made out sand glued together with chocolate syrup.  Not that it was all that bad, either- A sand-brick glued together with chocolate syrup still contains chocolate syrup.

Anyway, be happy my friends, light some candles, play with your toys, and carry on until spring.

Like a phoenix from the ashes, if the phoenix were room-temperature, and the ashes were a perfectly functioning, if poorly-maintained website. Any way you roast that succulent, mythical bird, this is the reboot of lllama.com, home to my art, musings, and contact info. This new version promises to make my life much easier while still making it worth your efforts to come here and hope, previously in vain, for some new art.

My blog is now part of the site and much prettier, and I promise to tend to it much more frequently. You, my friends, fans, and compatriots, deserve no less of me, even as you might deserve less OF me. Also, consider chasing me down like a blushing Actaeon on Facebook, my page on which I might update even more frequently than here.