Month: May 2016

Don’t Panic! towels and more

Prints and Products

 

product photo of a beach towel with an image of space and the words DON'T PANIC in large, friendly letters

The towel I’ve always wanted

Do you know where your towel is?

I’m delighted by the latest products added to the society6 line of home goods:  towels!  Not that I’m normally the sort of person who has their life well enough together to be excited about towels– this is a special case.

It’s a special case because that one of my favorite (and by far the best-selling) designs, one inspired by and a tribute to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…is now available in towel form.

Why is that important?  I’ll let the man himself explain:

…a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”

-Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Click here to view or purchase DON’T PANIC! towels!

 

 

Letters from my younger self

Personal
365 Days, Day 34

365 Days, Day 34

I’ve spent the weekend salvaging what I can from a dying hard drive.  The files in the most danger (on the partition that constantly disconnects, and then reconnects with intimidating messages like THIS VOLUME CANNOT BE REPAIRED.  TRANSFER FILES TO ANOTHER VOLUME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE) are mostly from my senior year of college.

It’s fun to look back at those pictures and art projects.  Some are things I’d completely forgotten about; others are files I’ve been meaning to pull open again for years.

I’m happiest to revisit the self-portraits.  This is an era where I took a self-portrait every day, for over a year.  The project quickly became a visual journal, documenting the ups and downs of a stressful and wonderful (and stressful; it’s worth mentioning twice) year.

Mustering the creativity and courage for a portrait every day was a challenge.  The good days were great!  But every artist (every person, I suspect) has times when they feel they have nothing to give.  Feeling that way and being under the commitment to make art anyway–and not just art, but a self–portrait–is exhausting.

“Someday you’ll go back through these photos and appreciate them,” I told myself on bad days.  “You’ll be glad you stuck with this.”

I was right.