Archive for May, 2010

Do something awesome every day.

In case you missed the first three entries in this series, here’s a quick recap: I’m rolling out 100 things about me that are either interesting, odd or otherwise notable. Some of these things are public knowledge, but a number of them will likely take you by surprise. And I’m either disclosing enough to not ruin my future political aspirations with closet skeletons or disclosing too much and demolishing those hopes. Either way, here’s the long-anticipated final 25 in our rundown…

1. I played Frank N. Furter in a Rocky Horror Picture Show troupe at the movie theater I managed during high school. I’m not particularly proud of it now, but at the time, that was like being King of the Freaks.
2. I also auditioned for the role of Frank N. Furter in a live performance of Rocky Horror that was being organized for the 20th or 25th anniversary celebration, but I get really self-conscious about my voice when it is unaccompanied, so I didn’t sing strongly enough to get the part.
3. I asked a girl I dated for a while after high school why when we hung out once during high school she wouldn’t kiss me. She told me it was because my breath was bad. I’m not sure to this day if she was being brutally honest or dryly sarcastic. Sadly, I think it was the former.
4. In the middle part of high school, my bedroom walls comprised posters of Guns N’ Roses and The Black Crowes and strings of Christmas lights … and my bed featured Disney-themed sheets. WTF?
5. I’ve worn corrective lenses since about fifth grade for nearsightedness. I wore big, ugly glasses for the first five years or so, but got contacts right before my sophomore year of high school and have worn them ever since (for the most part). But I kinda think I look better in glasses. Or at least, smarter.
6. In 2004, I wrote, directed and played a small part in a one-performance play called “With the Band.” It was about domestic violence and created for UNLV’s Men Rebelling Against Violence expo.
7. I do not have a MySpace account. My band does have a MySpace that I help moderate. I used to be on MySpace but very abruptly and publicly deleted it in early 2006, in a disconnect I wrote about in the Las Vegas Weekly.
8. I’ve had a one-night stand only once, when I was 18. My car was broken down at the time, so one of my friends actually drove this girl and me to my house that night. I found out later that he had slept with her the night before. Not surprisingly, she later became a stripper.
9. In elementary school, I would rub out those big pink erasers, collect the shavings, and try to sell them to kids. And sometimes, they would buy them. Kids are stupid.
10. One time during elementary school, I brought a mixture of baking soda and sugar wrapped in tin foil to school, intending to sell it as cocaine. I think I got $5 for it. Wow, I was a f*cked up kid.
11. When I worked at the Torrey Pines Discount Cinema in high school, we showed a lot of gang culture movies and cult midnight movies, which means there was a lot of marijuana smoking going on just about all the time. On more than one occasion, I would find dime bags dropped on the floor of the theaters. Even though I didn’t usually smoke out, I did stash a collection in my bedroom, and I think I sold one bag for … $5. Things didn’t change much since elementary school.
12. At Torrey Pines we hosted a screening of one of the “House Party” movies. When Kid (of Kid ‘n’ Play) came to the theater, I got him a Coke while he hung out in my office.
13. Leaving the studios of a local rock station after picking up a contest prize one day, I walked past Brett Michaels of Poison.
14. Once when I was 5, a family friend was staying with my family at our duplex in Philadelphia. I went down to the basement one morning and saw him dicing up a white substance. He told me it was aspirin. It took me quite a few years before I realized it was cocaine. Hey, it was the ’80s.
15. Something odd happened to me when I was 6 that has pervasively bothered me for 25-plus years. My recollection is vague, but I think I was hanging out at this girl’s house, and I wanted to leave for some reason, so much that I bolted out of there and onto my Big Wheel. A couple of other kids were holding onto it so I couldn’t get away, but eventually I did and sped home. To this day, I have no idea what or why. Even at 6 I was having paranoid delusions. Great.
16. I adopted the “Pj” name (born Paul Joseph) when I was 14, but it took my family moving across the country for me to be able to start over with a clean slate to get buy-in from people on that. My extended family (whom I’ve seen once in 20 years) still calls me “Paul,” but my parents have settled for “Peej.”
17. I’m a huge Billy Joel fan, in a totally un-ironic way. I could pretty much listen to his music ad nauseum, and own much of his late-70s and early-80s output on vinyl.
18. Toward the tail end of high school, I was so obsessed with Jim Morrison, people pretty much started calling me “Jim.” I had approximated as many of his mannerisms as I could, in addition to adopting the hairstyle and clothing (down to the custom-fit leather pants and a beaded necklace I modeled after the “Young Lion” photos).
19. In an 8th grade art class, I painted a visual representation of the Led Zeppelin song “Battle of Evermore.” It was pretty terrible, and is probably the reason I never again attempted to paint anything.
20. Also in 8th grade, I decided to start publishing a school paper because there was none at my middle school. I did the layouts with a school computer — I think — and had either my parents or one of my teachers photocopy it. I published maybe two or three issues only, mostly focusing on school gossip and sports results. The vice principal caught wind of it and actually thanked me in the hall one day. I guess my destiny to work in journalism was fixed at a young age.
21. A few years later, when I was a sophomore in high school, I started a neighborhood publication along similar lines. It was a weekly, photocopied newsletter, basically a gossip rag for my friends and the kids in my neighborhood, like who was dating whom and other dirty laundry. That lasted maybe a month.
22. My first professionally published article was in Scope Magazine, a local alternative newspaper that eventually became the Las Vegas Weekly, in 1993. I was 16. According to its publisher (and now friend) James Reza, I got paid for it, though I never received the check. To this day, I still bug him about it, to either his amusement or annoyance.
23. In fourth or fifth grade, I fell backward off a block wall after some kids fighting accidentally pushed into me. It was about a 6-to-8-foot drop, and I landed right on my head. It knocked me unconscious, and when I woke up, I was in a wheelchair in the nurse’s office. I never got checked for anything serious, but I’m pretty sure you can thank any of my nonsense today on that incident. My brains are scrambled.
24. I’ve only had one cavity my entire life, and that was in a baby tooth on its way out anyway.
25. Though I’ve had a lot of break-ups in my life, almost all of them have been amicable, and I’m still friends with almost everyone I’ve ever dated. For better or worse.

If you’re STILL hungering for more access to the annals of Pj, you could ask me an anonymous question on Formspring for all the world to see.

Do people read blogs anymore? I mean, I guess they do, but do people read my blog anymore? I sometimes feel as though there’s not really a point to it anymore. Unless it’s on Facebook or Twitter, no one really seems to care these days. And that’s fine, I get it, I’ve moved on myself. Maybe we were never as interested in what other people had to say in the first place and were just dying to have them cut it down to 140 characters or less. Maybe all we wanted to do was tag other people in photos of ourselves so they’d come gaze upon our awesome selves. Who knows?

I look back on my Livejournal, which I actively used from 2005 to 2008, and it’s a pretty accurate documenting of my entire life for that period. I’m not sure what makes every other blogging platform I’ve used since shutting that down to the public so much less effective. I suppose it may dovetail with my adoption of Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Maybe it has to do with the loss of Livejournal’s “community” aspect. I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t think what I have to say or do is as interesting anymore on a day-to-day basis. Of course, if that were the case, why would I have updated my Twitter status more than 23,000 times since late 2008?

On the flip side, I’ve noticed my Google Reader, which I use to regularly peruse my favorite blogs and webcomics, doesn’t fill up as fast as it used to. In general, people seem to be blogging far less frequently, and I know I’ve unsubscribed to a number of blogs as time has passed, mainly because I realized I wasn’t ever reading them, either for lack of time or lack of interest.

This isn’t news, of course. A casual web search for “blogging is dead” will return a large number of articles and, ironically, of course, blog posts about the subject. But for me, it leads me to wonder “what’s next?” For a society that seems so obsessed with knowing what everyone is doing at every moment, we seem far less concerned with what those people are actually thinking or feeling. Does this paradigm shift speak to a larger societal issue, that of our dwindling compassion for others? Our collective shrinking attention span? Our inability to invest in anything outside of Lost and reality TV?

Or maybe we’re just bored with blogs. Carry on.

In the midst of blazing through drawing Utopian pages to get a month or so ahead, so I can focus on other projects that are about to take over, including another feature for Seven and a new comic anthology. And lunch.

Oh, wanna ask me probing questions anonymously (or otherwise)? There’s an app for that.

Back to the drawing board. Finally started work on the third chapter of the “Omega” serial from Omega Comics Presents (you did order issue two, right?) now that contracts have been issued for that anthology’s third issue, and getting a bit ahead on The Utopian. About to start work on a new one-off anthology that you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future, which I’m editing and contributing a piece as well. Going to try to get some serious writing done today on several fiction projects, as I need to start on my next feature for Seven soon.

One of Las Vegas’ most in-demand photographers — and one of the nicest guys I know — is Erik Kabik. In addition to being everywhere in town, shooting red carpets and VIP events for wire photo service RETNA, Erik is also the house photographer for the Hard Rock Hotel, a post he’s earned thanks to years of shooting live music. I’ve been lucky enough to have Erik’s concert imagery accompany multiple features I’ve written for HRH magazine.

To celebrate 20 years of shooting concerts, Erik’s favorite concert photos will be on display at the Mandarin Bar on the 23rd floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel at CityCenter on Monday, May 17. If you get a chance, stop by the reception from 6 to 8 p.m., where long-time Vegas DJ Shoe will be spinning the tunes while Ty Ku provides complimentary cocktails.

Erik’s subjects on display will include The Grateful Dead, Jay-Z, Kings of Leon, Dave Matthews, Madonna and much more. If you’re a fan of music or photography, I highly recommend checking out his work.

We have found the way to the art ...

As I self-promoted in at least one or two places last week, my Friday evening was spent manning a table outside the Funk House at the corner of Casino Center Boulevard and Colorado Avenue, attempting to sell comics and pop art to the masses at First Friday. Despite having a location on the south side of the building (meaning I was facing away from all of the Casino Center action) and often being mistaken for part of the adjacent First Friday info table, it actually went somewhat better than expected. Though I didn’t sell as much art as I’d hoped (four prints and one set of postcards), I did a decent amount of comics – surely helped by the three-for-10-dollars deal I was offering on The Utopian.*

To be honest, I actually sold almost as much in four hours on a street in Downtown Las Vegas as I did in two full days at Emerald City Comicon in Seattle – and unlike the nearly $1000 trip to Seattle, the table at First Friday cost me nothing. Not sure what that portends, but there it is.

It helped that the weather was absolutely perfect – a rare day without wind – and the crowds were phat. I’m actually a little sad I missed cruising the art walk that night, but I did get a chance to preview most (but definitely not all) of the new shows that opened this week on Thursday night, including new works by Gina Quaranto and Peter Mengert at Place Gallery, and a mind-blowing exhibit by Philip Denker at Trifecta Gallery.

I may do the First Friday vendor thing again, though not until the fall. But stay tuned for upcoming First Friday appearances that may be more … wall-worthy.

*A number of people have inquired about obtaining the prints offered during First Friday, specifically “The Best at What He Does (Knitting Wolverine)” and “Giant Robot.” If you’re interested in either, just drop me an e-mail and we’ll work it out.